New Study Bolsters Idea of Differences Between Science and Not Science

With friends like the IOC and the New York Times, women's sports doesn't need enemies

I was being reasonable, open minded—oh look, here’s a study that says trans women (you must use the jargon of gender ideology instead of the language of biology if you want to get published) actually have physiological disadvantages compared to women in several key measures. And I dutifully got about educating myself. This study was funded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), by the way.

But I tired, trying to keep straight the sex and natural and artificial hormonal state of the participants, my focus wandered, and it occurred that we already have at least 18 studies that prove quite the opposite, that trans-identified males retain physiological advantage despite testosterone suppression. Do we really need more evidence? Why is the IOC not satisfied with the findings of 18 studies? Almost as if they have an outcome they’d like proven and will keep tossing about money until they find someone willing to make the numbers come out right.

Why, I thought, have scientists had to spend time and money proving over and over again something we all know? Well, that is because the IOC allowed trans-identified men in women’s sports first and when there was complaint, demanded proof that it wasn’t fair, instead of the onus being on trans-identified men to prove they have no advantage before being allowed in. As Fair Play For Women point out, the IOC ignored the precautionary principle—if there’s reasonable risk of harm (unfairness) then you don’t need perfect proof. Women’s sports should have remained for women only until it was comprehensively proven trans-identified men brought no advantage at all. But the IOC ignored that, and here we are.

Frustrated, I realize all of this Frankenstein-ish messing around, trying to make a man into a facsimile of a woman misses the point. Even if you could ghoulishly hobble all trans-identified men such that they had no physiological advantage over women, THEY’RE STILL MEN. IT’S WOMEN’S SPORTS. THEY DON’T BELONG IN WOMEN’S SPORTS. NOT IF THEY CUT OFF A LEG, NOT IF THEY GET FAKE BOOBS, NOT IF THEY’RE OOZING ESTROGEN, NOT IF THEY ARE FAT AND HOPELESS ATHLETES. MEN ARE NOT WOMEN SAM I AM.

Hormonal profile, or jump height, or fat-free mass, or nmol/liter be damned. It’s women’s sports and women deserve to have something that is just for women. Because they are a class of human being distinct from men. That is enough of a reason. And we have all known this, the IOC has known this, since the beginning of time. In fact, that’s why we’re here trying to be gracious about the most insulting pile of garbage ever to be published in a scientific journal—the IOC is quite certain who are the men (the ones who should be listened to, whose feelings matter) and who are the women (who needn’t, whose don’t). Sigh.

And then along comes Jere never-met-a-man-who-didn’t-belong-in-women’s-sports Longman, enabled by the New York Times. saying “trans women are not biological men,” and I can’t let that brand of BS stand unanswered.

The lead investigator in the study Longman wrote about, Blair Hamilton, a 6’2” trans-identified man who is still smarting over criticism he received for playing on a women’s football (soccer) team, declared even before he started the study that he hoped to show that trans-identified men who reduced their testosterone and supplemented with estrogen had no advantage over women. Starting with a result you’d like and working backward from there is not scientific protocol.

And neither was Hamilton’s recruitment poster.

For comment on Hamilton, et al’s study, I consulted acclaimed exercise scientist and co-author of one of the 18 studies that demonstrates male advantage remains even after hormone treatment, Tommy Lundberg. Here’s what he had to say about Hamilton’s recruitment poster.

“This is a very unfortunate statement. Not only does it attract certain people who may be particularly motivated to influence policy in a different direction, but it also provides an additional incentive for trans women not to put in maximum effort. I’m not saying they did not give it their best shot, I have no way of knowing that, but it's hard enough to maximize effort in a study like this when there's an incentive to underperform, and this statement in the advertisement for the study certainly didn’t help that. It basically gives the participants direction on how they can be involved in changing policy.”

One of the main weaknesses of previous studies of trans-identified males is that this population is thin on the ground, so researchers had to take whoever they could get, regardless of whether they were athletes or not. And most were not. Hamilton’s study sought participants who were competitive athletes, OR who were physically active three times per week. That could include a 2:30 marathoner training 10 hours/week or someone who walks briskly three times a week. They studied men, trans men, women, and trans women.

As it turned out, these groups were not matched, as they should have been for meaningful comparison. Lundberg explains:

“Cross-sectional study means that you only compare the groups at a single point in time. There is no way of knowing the baseline values of these participants before they started hormone therapy. This is the strength of a longitudinal design: you can compare before and after in the same person. A closer look at the data reveals that the cohorts are not matched and the main comparison is between fit/trained reference women and unfit transgender women. The TW cohort has a BMI of 26 (overweight) and 10kg more fat mass and a 50% higher fat mass index than the reference women. The reference women also have a relatively high VO2max (54 ml, which would correspond to the highest elite level in women's team sports, for example). In comparison, the VO2max of the TW is 45 ml, which corresponds more to an untrained/moderately active young adult. There is simply no way of knowing how much of this is due to the testosterone suppression and how much is due to the unbalanced groups. Even though the groups were not matched to allow a fair comparison, the trans women still had 12 kg more lean mass (which essentially means muscle mass) than the women they were compared to, suggesting that trans women still have a very clear advantage in muscle mass.”

One of the confounding factors of having unmatched cohorts, as this study did, is that some of the metrics are confusing. For example, the investigators made much of the fact that the “trans women” didn’t jump as high as women, which they interpreted as a sports disadvantage, but they failed to note that the “trans women” produced more power than women. Lundberg explains:

“When you jump, you have to lift your own body weight. A heavier person with more muscle mass therefore generally generates more power when jumping, but this does not necessarily translate into a greater jumping height, as the higher body weight has to be pushed off the ground.”

And then, as discussed above in the recruitment poster, the “trans women” in this study would have been incentivized to underperform, and there was no way of knowing whether they gave a maximal effort. Participants were tested in hand grip strength, jump height, and VO2 max (usually a proxy for aerobic fitness). Lundberg discussed the problem of knowing the “desired” outcome of a test:

“This is very difficult in fitness tests, especially in strength and jumping tests. There are ways to study muscle activation, but they haven’t done that. In VO2max tests, there are certain criteria to assess whether a maximal result has been achieved. These include detecting a plateau in the VO2 curve (VO2 does not increase despite increased power output from the participant). Unfortunately, this is not sufficiently mentioned in the study, making it difficult to determine if they pushed as hard as they could. The authors used respiratory exchange ratio of ≥1.1 to classify the test as maximal, which doesn't really work.”

Hamilton was pretty circumspect in his conclusion. Pointing out that, yes, this cohort (of overweight, unfit) trans women couldn’t jump as high as women and had lower VO2, but “this research shows the potential complexity of transgender athlete physiology and its effects on the laboratory measures of physical performance.” Maybe not the blazing rebuke of those 18 studies that showed trans women retain advantage that he had hoped for. Hamilton nevertheless claimed these findings were enough to suspend bans on “trans women” in women’s sports, ironically invoking the precautionary principle that was ignored when it should have been used to prevent “trans women” in the women’s category in the first place.

Perhaps hoping to enliven their findings, one of the investigators, Yannis Pitsiladis, spun their findings into this whopper: That given their physiological differences (at least the four that they measured), “trans women are not biological men.” This startling statement hit the veteran journalist Longman square in the forehead and did not produce a blink. He swallowed it whole, it came out in the same condition, unmasticated, and that’s what tens of…tens of New York Times readers will think of as the latest science.

I actually did read the study and saw nothing that would support such a Nobel-worthy bombshell, so I asked Pitsiladis for clarification. He clarified via email that instead of “trans women are not biological men,” he meant:

“transwomen are not hormonally or physiologically the same as men.”

“Not biological men,” “not the same as biological men” —see the difference? What Pitsiladis told Longman and Longman dutifully scribbled down is that a year of hormone treatment makes a trans woman no longer a man. This is just nuts, to use a fancy scientific term. And highly irresponsible of both Pitsiladis to say and Longman to print. I asked Lundberg about it.

Yes, that is a strange statement. It doesn’t help readers to confuse biological sex. Of course trans women are biological males who identify as women. What he [Pitsiladis] probably means in this particular context is that they didn’t perform at the same level as the group of men they were comparing results with.

This “study” that identifies as science should never have gone farther than Blair Hamilton’s personal grievance. Instead it was funded by the very influential IOC, published in a reputable scientific journal due to same, and handed to the public by the New York Times. And it will continue to be trotted out by activists, spreading its misinformation in the course of making sports policy for years to come.

The bright spot here is that a significant and growing list of sports organizations—World Aquatics, World Athletics, World Rugby, International Cycling, and some national governing organizations—do know the difference between science and not science.