Trans women athletes may actually have disadvantages compared to cis women

In a significant blow to the conservative, anti-trans argument that transgender women possess insurmountable biological advantages over cisgender women that should make them ineligible to compete in women’s sports, new research suggests that the opposite may in fact be true.

A new study, funded in part by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and published recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, compared the athletic abilities of 35 trans athletes with those of 40 cisgender athletes. Researchers looked at cardiovascular performance, strength, and lower-body power in 23 trans women, 12 trans men, 21 cis women, and 19 cis men. The trans participants had all undergone more than one year of hormone therapy, while all participants, cis and trans, were either active in competitive sports or took part in physical training at least three times per week.

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Researchers found that trans women had decreased lung function and equivalent bone density, which is linked to muscle strength, compared to cis woman. Trans women also performed worse than cis women in certain cardiovascular tests and had less lower-body strength than cis women. Researchers also found “notable disparities in fat mass, fat-free mass, laboratory sports performance measures and hand-grip strength measures between cisgender male and transgender female athletes,” differences which they said “underscore the inadequacy of using cisgender male athletes as proxies for transgender women athletes.”

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Anti-trans activists and Republican politicians pushing for bans on trans women and girls’ participation in sports under the guise of fairness to cis women have consistently sought to misrepresent trans women’s athletic abilities as indistinguishable from those of cisgender men. But the main takeaway of the new study, lead researcher Yannis Pitsiladis told LGBTQ Nation sibling site Outsports, is that international sports federations and the experts they consult to craft their guidelines should be required to treat trans women as distinct from cisgender men.

“It follows that research conducted comparing biological men to biological women is almost irrelevant in this debate and evidence from such comparisons should not be used to inform policy as is the case by many ‘armchair professors’ advocating the default ban position,” he said.

The study’s authors noted the limited sample size and other shortcomings of their research and called for a “long-term longitudinal study” to confirm whether their findings were directly related to gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT). However, they cautioned against “precautionary bans and sport eligibility exclusions that are not based on sport-specific (or sport-relevant) research.”

During a panel at the SportAccord summit in Birmingham, U.K., last week, Pitsiladis told Outsports that he hoped the new research would help convince the IOC to fund further research.  

Pitsiladis added that he hopes the new study to make it easier for smaller sports federations to develop their own guidelines for trans inclusion rather than defaulting to the positions of larger sporting bodies that have instituted blanket bans on trans women participating in women’s events.

“But I suspect most will follow the positions of the large federations to ban. Also, it’s unlikely that those large federations will change their position as they are now too invested and they don’t really look at the science or evidence,” he said. “Their wish is mainly to appease their membership and the decisions being taken are mainly justified by politics and dictates, rather than science.”

Trans journalist Katelyn Burns, writing for MSNBC, was similarly dubious of the study’s potential impact on anti-trans legislation.

“The trans athlete debate has never really been about fairness or safety in women’s sports. It’s always been about putting laws on the books that legally define trans women as men as a precedent for passing more anti-trans laws unrelated to sports,” she wrote. “So this research will likely not make a difference in red state legislatures.”

Still, Burns is hopeful that the research will show sports administrators “who’ve gone all in on trans bans” that “science is showing their assumptions and arguments [about trans bodies] to be wrong.” The new study, she wrote, is “a vindication for the many trans athletes, writers, and advocates who’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to explain to general audiences that trans bodies differ greatly from cisgender bodies.”