More research needed to support bans on transgender women in sports -

When the LPGA and USGA announced New policy effectively bans transgender womenThey said they were doing so based on the advice of medical experts as well as research showing that reaching male puberty would give transgender women a competitive advantage in golf.

However, neither organization provided details on the experts or science, and two researchers who specialize in studies of transgender athletes said there was no such study involving golfers. As many researchers say, there is no reliable study showing that transgender women have a clear competitive advantage.

said Debra Krieger, who as a research associate at E-Alliance was part of the team that reviewed existing data and literature on transgender women’s participation in sport for the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport.

In fact, most of the studies used to claim that transgender women have competitive advantages in sports are based on the performance of cisgender men, This is not an appropriate comparison. Or compare the performance of transgender female athletes to that of “straight” cisgender or non-athlete women. Nor is it an appropriate comparison.

One of the few studies that compared transgender female athletes to cisgender female athletes found that transgender women had lower lung capacity and cardiovascular function. Maybe put them in The defect.

“Transgender women, and female athletes in particular, are very different from cisgender male athletes,” said Blair Hamilton, one of the researchers in the study published in April in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

“This is one of the most important findings from the research we did. They need to be studied as their own unique group.”

The problem is that there aren’t enough transgender athletes to conduct robust, long-term studies. Bans like those imposed by the LPGA and USGA will only make it more difficult to conduct research that will allow entry decisions to be made based on facts and data rather than fear and demonization.

“There’s not a lot of data,” says DJ Oberlin, an assistant professor and exercise physiologist at Lehman College who last year published a paper reviewing the available science on transgender participation in sports.

“The more we close down these policies, the less chance we have of finding the right answer to this question,” said Hamilton, a research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The number of transgender people is tiny, at just 0.6% of Americans ages 13 or older, according to one study. 2022 study by the Williams InstituteUniversity of California Law Research Center. Contrary to what some right-wing politicians and influencers want to believe, the number of transgender athletes is even lower.

NCAA President Charlie Baker said last week that there is “Less than 10” Transgender athletes are among 510,000 college athletes. There has been only one openly transgender woman in the Olympics, although her participation has been allowed since 2004. There are no openly transgender women in the WNBA, NWSL, LPGA, or WTA.

But transgender people, and athletes in particular, have increasingly become targets of the right wing, with widespread ignorance and often bad-faith arguments to marginalize them.

Transgender female athletes have opponents like men, while research shows they don’t. Even before hormone therapy, transgender women have less body mass and strength. According to a report by the Canadian Center for Sports Ethicspublished in 2022. Krieger, now assistant director of curriculum, equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, said these symptoms have decreased further with hormone treatment.

“A lot of people who want to enforce the ban look at trans women (and say): ‘They have bigger bones, so they have more muscle mass,’” Hamilton said. “If you look at transgender athletes, they are actually weaker than cisgender athletes, and they have In fact, less muscle mass.

The effect of prior exposure to testosterone in transgender women is also often assumed to be equal to the effects of steroids, according to the CCES report. But she said this was a “false bioequivalence.” Or performances by cisgender men are used as predictions for trans women.

“Many claims about the benefits of testosterone in athletics are unverified because they are often taken for granted in biological research papers and do not include citations,” the CCES report said.

When the International Women’s Forum, a conservative group hostile to trans women, He sent a letter to tour officials in August signed by 275 current and former playerscited performance statistics for cisgender men to argue that cisgender women would be at a disadvantage against trans women.

Neither the LPGA nor the USGA specified whether this letter was used in crafting the new gender policy, which was announced earlier this month. The LPGA said it consulted “experts in diverse fields, including medicine, science, sports physiology, golf performance and gender policy law, along with feedback from a wide range of stakeholders.” The USGA said it “consulted with a range of experts in transgender medicine and sports science” and was “confident that we have benefited from objective scientific research from independent and unbiased experts.”

But Hamilton and Oberlin said there is no study comparing the performance of transgender female golfers who undergo gender-affirming hormone therapy with cisgender female golfers. With the LPGA and USGA refusing to provide evidence to the contrary, the only conclusion can be that the assumptions they make about transgender women are just that: assumptions.

“I think they did consult people,” Oberlin said. “I don’t know how thoroughly they looked at everyone or whether they only went to one or two people who were likely to agree with them.”

One of the things that jumped out at the research team behind the CCES report was the lack of clarity about what gives any athlete a performance advantage, Krieger said. Is it hormones? Is it height? Is it the length of his limbs?

There is simply no way to make sweeping generalizations, Krieger said. Not from a factual basis, anyway.

“It’s a mystery as to what makes performance peak,” she said. “It appears from the review that linking this back to specific biomarkers is a doomed project. There has been nothing yet to show that this is a biomarker that can differentiate between sex or that can differentiate between performance.”

“It seems like it’s probably going to be a bigger mix,” she added.

The ban on transgender athletes is an extension of what has long been the policing of women’s bodies and attempts to keep women out of sports. Women were banned from running the Boston Marathon until 1972 because they were not believed to be “physiologically capable.” Female figure skaters were not allowed to participate in the Olympics until 2014 for fear of their uteruses falling out. Women were forced to submit Genital checks In the 1960s, using a humiliating method called “naked exhibitionism” because it required athletes to walk past doctors without wearing underwear. This was eventually replaced by genetic screening.

These ridiculous ideas were abandoned only after there was scientific evidence to the contrary, and doses of common sense. Who’s to say that banning transgender athletes won’t be viewed the same way in the future?

But without more studies, preferably sports-specific, no one will be able to say for sure. Until then, Hamilton and the other authors of the BJSM study caution sports organizations against enforcing bans and excluding transgender athletes.

“If you’re so confident in your position, why don’t you let us do our job?” Hamilton said. “Let transgender athletes compete now, let us test them. If we discover there is an advantage, we will report it.”

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armor on social media @nrarmour.