“It’s not necessary for all advantages to be removed. All that is necessary is for trans women to perform more like cisgender women than like cisgender men.”

Trans-identified male "scientists" can't get the data to come out right, so...

Scientific papers are not the kind of thing you want to curl up with of a winter’s eve. But stick with me here because I’m about to show you how dissecting trans activist pseudoscience can be very entertaining, in a wtaf sort of way. The problem is, this outrageous stuff that identifies as science is being taken seriously. It’s important that I expose you to this affliction so you’ll recognize it when you inevitably come across articles that contain gems like “trans-identified males are not biological males” (!), or that trans-identified men actually have disadvantages in women’s sports. When we see a boy standing on a girl’s podium and wonder how did we get here, it’s likely trans activist nonscience was used to lobby lawmakers and policymakers. This detour from reality is necessary, like draining the septic tank every now and then, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of fun. So, put on your containment suit and let’s dive into some pseudoscience byproduct!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Trans Activist Pseudoscience

We will focus on the tragically published (that it ever saw the printed page is a story of the ideological capture of academia) study titled A unique pseudo-eligibility analysis of longitudinal laboratory performance data from a transgender female competitive cyclist. The primary investigator is Blair Hamilton, a big bloke who plays in a women’s football league in the UK, but does not consider this a conflict of interest in conducting a study that seeks to validate trans-identified men in women’s sports. Were you too momentarily hopeful about pseudo-eligibility in the title? I thought for a minute Hamilton was going to be honest, but no.

Something to note right off is that this study involves a trans-identified male cyclist. A cyclist. One. N=1. They’re drawing conclusions from a participation group of one.

The other prominent name in the category of trans activist pseudoscience is Joanna Harper, another trans-identified man who has, for more than a decade, been unable to design a study that shows trans-identified men have no advantage over women. Undeterred, Harper instead shamelessly concludes that men can “meaningfully” compete with women as long as women accept unfairness. He has gone on national TV and has been interviewed by major media as an expert, and as this raging misogyny spews from his mouth, the “reporter” is busy making sure she’s spelled unfairness correctly and thanking Harper for the interview. It’s appalling.

In the same way that there is no reason to wade into debates about whether trans-identified males are dominating women’s sports—that’s moot, they’re male, they’re in the wrong category—Hamilton and Harper both rely on the testosterone reduction model. Which is moot. As Jon Pike points out, the testosterone reduction model has been thoroughly discredited because it slightly reduces but does not remove male advantage. Hamilton and Harper persist in beating this dead horse because testosterone is the only factor out of millions of sex differences they can fiddle around with. They’ve both run up against these limitations, and have jointly invented some novel theories and creative methods of hobbling a man which we’ll encounter in a minute.

Hamilton, et al’s paper sparked a critique published in the same journal, and an equally quick response to the critique by Hamilton’s group. Having read all three in the Hamilton series, and Harper’s 2022 manifesto, I needed a libation and some expert insight to unpick their purposely tortured language. I turned to Greg Brown, a professor of exercise science at University of Nebraska-Kearney and one of the authors of the critique of Hamilton’s paper. As it turned out, most of the things I thought were blatant nonscience, purposeful lies, and unsupported leaps of logic but had perhaps misunderstood, were, in fact, blatant nonscience, purposeful lies, and unsupported leaps of logic.

Hamilton’s study took a cross-sectional (one-time) measure of the max VO2, countermovement jump (lower body strength), hand grip [strength], body composition and blood sampling of male and female and trans-identified athletes. They also followed one sub-elite (remember this) trans-identified male cyclist for a year after receiving “gender-affirming hormone treatment” (testosterone suppression and estrogen supplementation). Hamilton mentioned in the paper that though it would have been more applicable to use a leg press to test lower body power and a cycling ergometer to measure max VO2, they did not use these readily available instruments, and instead used jump height and a treadmill session. Odd.

While all the study participants were supposed to be athletes, the requirement was vaguely to participate in competitive sport or training three times/week. Intensity of those sessions was self-reported. So, “athlete” could be someone who walks briskly three times/week or someone who’s running 100 miles/week, but these individuals would have such vastly different physiological profiles as to be incomparable. This is a tried and untrue trans activist nonscience sleight of hand. Incomparable study groups allowed Hamilton’s previous study to shockingly conclude that trans-identified men are at a disadvantage compared to women, “science” that has been referred to ad nauseum by those pushing a male inclusion agenda. That study actually proved that overweight, out-of-shape trans-identified men could not heft themselves off the ground as high as very fit women. Considerably less newsworthy.

Another methodological flaw that bedevils longitudinal studies of testosterone-suppressed males is that they know what the result “should” be. They “should” lose strength and aerobic capacity, and are therefore incentivized to underperform. “It’s nearly impossible to control for purposeful underperforming,” Greg Brown said. “We can look at blood lactate or heart rate to try to determine if they’ve given a maximum effort, but it’s pretty easy to undermine the results. You can come into the test dehydrated and sleep deprived. You can eat poorly.”

One of the tactics used by both Hamilton and Harper for reducing male advantage on paper is the use of absolute and relative scores. Absolute score is the value measured. Most of the time, trans-identified males’ absolute scores for max VO2, strength, and lower body power are higher than women’s, even after hormonal treatment. Relative score is the absolute score mathematically adjusted to account for the test subject’s body mass. Since trans-identified males are usually taller and heavier than women, their relative score is much lower than their absolute score. For example, Hamilton writes, “After 12 months, the absolute handgrip [strength of the sub-elite trans-identified male cyclist] remained 12 % above the mean of cisgender women and relative handgrip was 17 % below cisgender women.” See how relative strength of the trans-identified male, on paper, looks less than women’s? Fun with numbers, huh? But that’s not how it plays out in real life.

Brown explained: “Absolute power in cycling matters more than relative power. Trans women don’t shrink with testosterone suppression. They still have more body mass and more lean body mass than women, and lean body mass is the engine that drives athletic performance. In a cycling race, you don’t adjust for relative power. That doesn’t translate to performance. The athlete with higher absolute values for max VO2 and power will have an advantage in performance.”

Engineering a study with incomparable groups, personally invested participants, and twisted measurements, and still, trans-identified males stubbornly maintain performance advantages. Both Harper and Hamilton have hatched a novel notion to address this—that transgender males and females were never actually males and females. That they represent some kind of third sex with physical abilities somewhere between males and females, but though this scheme would seem to place trans-identified males at an advantage to women, crucially, they argue, trans-identified males should compete in the female category. Wait, what?

Hamilton wrote: “The primary conclusion from both our cross-sectional and longitudinal papers are that transgender women or transgender men athletes do not exhibit the same performance characteristics as their cisgender peers; therefore, both should be studied as distinct cohorts.”

Harper wrote: “There is significant evidence that gender identity is largely or perhaps entirely biological. Hence transgender women [trans-identified males] are never wholly biologically male.”

Brown’s take on this: “Hamilton seems to be saying trans women and trans men are not male and not female. They’re apparently in between men and women. Hamilton and Harper seem to be arguing for a third transgender category, but they then conclude trans women should compete as women.” Trans activist science, my friends, where all things are possible if you say so.

Or if you toss around so freaking much word salad the beleaguered reader might not notice a sleight of hand, like this, from Hamilton: “Therefore, a disadvantage or advantage in average power for this transgender female athlete in the elite category of women’s cycling is unlikely to exist.” The heck?! After reading this 20 times and also consulting Brown, here’s the translation: Hamilton’s subject was a sub-elite cyclist. They’re saying that after a year of testosterone suppression, this sub-elite cyclist could equitably compete in elite women’s races. See the unfairness? A sub-elite man can compete in elite women’s sport. Pretty good man can compete with the very best women.

As I waded through Hamilton’s tortured justification for this one sub-elite man to compete in the female category, it defied logic (as if ANY of this made sense) that Hamilton et al were suggesting this sort of case-by-case two-year project be done on every single male athlete who wanted to compete in female sports. Did I understand that correctly?

“Yes,” was Brown’s short answer. “Yes, they’re suggesting a case-by-case approach for trans women. One athlete who knows what the performance results should be and is incentivized to underperform. That’s for starters. Then, who decides the benchmarks this person must achieve to compete in the female category? What measurements should be used? If these benchmarks are used for trans women, they probably would have to be used for females too, which would likely exclude truly high performing women from their own category while allowing inclusion of mediocre males. It’s like having individual speed limits on the highway based on age, driving skills, type of car, weather. The logistics just would not work.”

Joanna Harper was also willing to go to absurd lengths to include trans-identified males, that he clearly sees as NOT female, in the female category. When you read this, be aware that Harper, with a straight face, suggests these logistically outrageous “solutions” to shoehorning males into female sports, but somehow misses the OBVIOUS easy solution—that trans-identified males should compete in the male category.

Here’s Harper: “There may be some sports where additional restrictions would be indicated for fairness or safety concerns. For instance, volleyball, basketball, and rugby could limit each national team to one transgender woman. Different rules could be enacted in individual sports. For instance, the LPGA could have separate tees for trans women, and the International Weightlifting federation could use some sort of handicap system. Of course, any sort of handicap (such as longer tees) would require data to determine how much advantage trans women have in driving distance or in weightlifting. It isn’t yet clear how detailed data would need to be to create a handicap.” Is this a comedy sketch? This is reductio absurdum, right? Nope. Trans activist “science.”

Stick with me, people, we’re getting to the best part, the insane conclusions, swooping breathtakingly, unmoored from any sort of reason, from their own muddled data that shows that trans-identified males have advantage to—tada!!—AND THEREFORE THEY CAN COMPETE IN THE FEMALE CATEGORY.

From Hamilton’s handy visual above, we can see from the results that grip strength, countermovement jump, and max VO2 in their one trans-identified male cyclist declined after a year of hormone treatment but remained above that of the women they tested. To note, lower body strength (jump height) and max VO2 are most relevant to cycling success. They mention that the trans-identified male cyclist retained an advantage over women in 54% of the tests they performed. AND HERE’S THE HUGE LEAP OF IDEOLOGICAL FAITH—from that data, Hamilton concludes that the male cyclist “could be licensed to participate in cycling events in the female category after one year of GAHT (gender-affirming hormone treatment).” The, what?! How did they reach this conclusion from that data?

“That’s a good question,” Brown observed. “Apparently, the thought was, in ⅔ of the categories we studied, the trans-identified cyclist did not have an advantage, using relative scores. In only ⅓ of the categories we studied, they did have advantage, therefore, they can compete in the women’s category. They cherry-picked an arbitrary percentage of tests as a threshold for inclusion.”

And the final kicker, the piece de resistance of Hamilton’s trashing of science, the true measure of utter disdain for women and women’s sports—written like a man who has not and will not accept that women are deserving of boundaries as a separate class of humans.

Though male advantage remains, “the current data suggest that, even after one year of GAHT, some transgender female athletes may be fairly integrated into the female category on a provisional basis. Should subsequent competition data indicate unfair performance advantages, this decision could be reversed, or the GAHT requirement could be extended to two years or more. Conversely, an outright ineligibility for the female category on transgender women athletes in a specific sport precludes the opportunity to ascertain the true impact of GAHT on performance fairness, leaving the issue subject to speculation.”

Some males may be fairly integrated? Which ones? The weak ones? The shit athletes? As long as they promise not to win too frequently? Only until they get in good shape, and then what? This would be laughable were it not taken seriously by other dudes in sports organizations. And trans activist “journalists.” And policymakers hoping to look progressive, by prioritizing men’s feelings over women’s reality (?)

The data Hamilton just presented inarguably showed “unfair performance advantage,” so why would they need more of that? And why treat women’s competition like a laboratory for men? And who would determine if men show signs of unfair advantage (how would that be measured?) in real live competition in which real live women are unfairly disadvantaged (read: losing out on opportunities, prizes, places, a category with just women in it) in their own category? Hamilton is saying harm has to be done to women so that the unfairness he’s already shown exists is sufficient for someone to decide adjustments should to be made. Hamilton displays an astounding lack of acknowledgement that women are deserving of a women’s-only category with zero tolerance for unfairness. Like the men’s category. And of course, in the event, trans-identified males will accept being removed from the female category, right? And this whole bulldozing of the female category is justified because: speculation. Wait. Every single legitimate study that has ever been conducted has shown, unequivocally, that males cannot compete fairly in the female category. Hamilton, and Harper, are the only ones speculating.

Harper came to a similar vividly misogynistic conclusion. He told NBC News: “It’s not necessary for all advantages to be removed. All that is necessary is for trans women to perform more like cisgender women than like cisgender men.” So, women should accept unfairness because Harper says so.

And again, Harper, in his 2022 paper, saying the quiet part out loud:

“Given the barriers to sport, and the level of discrimination faced by transgender people along with the small size of the population, it is not unreasonable that in recreational sports we set aside the mandate for a level playing field and allow trans athletes to compete based on gender identity.”

I challenge you to imagine Harper announcing to the local men’s softball league or a men’s amateur level cycling race or the open category at the NYC Marathon that they should set aside the mandate for a level playing field and let people compete unfairly. Because there aren’t many of them, and people who compete unfairly often face a lot of discrimination.

If you’re still with me, I think we deserve a tot. This, my friends, is trans activist nonscience. It’s dressed up to look like science, but it doesn’t fool anybody. After decades of failure to make the numbers come out right, to make men in women’s sports look fair, Hamilton and Harper, two men who claim to be women, have come to the conclusion that men in women’s sports is unfair and that’s okay, because women simply don’t deserve fairness.