There is no question the hottest debate in sports for the last decade or so has been whether trans athletes should compete in male or female category sports. That is to say someone born scientifically a man or a woman and now identifies as the opposite gender now wants to compete with natural born men or women. Some say sport is actually about taking advantage of those physiological differences on your way to victory such that transgender athletes should be allowed to compete.The report states that biomedical factors such as testosterone, lung size and bone density aren’t the dominant factor in whether someone wins a race or not, but other factors like whether you have quality training facilities and nutrition. What automatically came to my mind reading this was that if this was all true why do we even have separate categories in sports in the first place. Come on, the report is saying just train hard and eat right then you can outrace Tadej Pogacar at the next Tour De France. If that was correct why have the average finishing times between men and women differ so much by as much That’s right I am questioning the motives of this report and it’s not the first time science has taken a side in political debate. Just go back to the 1930s and 1940s. Didn’t science say back then that there is no evidence that tobacco smoke has any lasting physical harm to the lungs and body? There are “Merchants of Doubt” out there. What is that old adage? Whoever pays the piper…
If I am a scientist in desperate need of funding or work and there so happens to be a pro liberal company with millions looking at trans research in sports, I am bound to make my piper happy. Everything else goes out of the window. Look, every human being has a right to choice. If you choose to identify as any gender , good for you. When it comes to sports we should draw the line. There were numerous instances of men competing with women and men crashed the women easily, no science is even needed. The report points out that some previous reports have used non athletic trans women as subjects and also not considering that hormone replacement therapy such as testosterone suppression has a way of leveling the playing field a bit. That in itself is hypocrisy at the worst. Why are we banning athletes for doping? We are banning them because having a higher than normal red blood cell count because it has advantages in the endurance races. The fact that it normalizes after a few months of taking testosterone suppression drugs doesn’t mean it applies to every single athlete. Different bodies react differently to different drugs. The last thing I have against this review is that it actually doesn’t do a trial race between a subject transgender cyclist for example and a professional cis athlete(a person assigned a gender at birth). There is no better evidence than observation. Just observe how your subject actually compete in actual competitive matches. A wrestling match between a trans and a cis man can only go one way. A football game between them usually goes a certain way most of the times. Ye, we live in an all inclusive world but the buck surely has to stop with sports.
Sporting Mecca 