Max testosterone level for trans athletes to be halved

Yeah, can't argue with that larry. And of course in my opinion the sports governing bodies should continue to set limits on the basis of the best scientific evidence available, and should be flexible to account for any new research or advice as it emerges. So... pretty much what we have now it would appear.

An extra gender is ridiculous.

Who will go to the trans games? Who will sponsor it? Etc

The testosterone level halving is a good thing. The studies need to be done (there was one mentioned in the same article) and unbiased conclusions need to be drawn.

If it is fair, they should compete in women’s sport (subject to rigorous testing, like all athletes). If they are seen to remain closer to males in muscle and stamina profiles, despite reduced testosterone, they should compete with the men. They won’t win anything, but nor will 99.9% of the rest of us.

Above all there should be a proper scientific process without bias in either direction.

I was perusing PhD places last week and saw that Loughborough Uni (iirc) are advertising several places to research gender/ sex and sport. If anyone fancies applying.

I should say sportswoman - athlete implies athletics. My apologies.

Micah, I'm a competitive athlete. Not an elite one. Think national leagues rather than international.

What have the IOC rulings got to do with GB medals? And seeing as the NGBs can set what they like for national competitions, but on the international stage it is the IGBs whose rules will apply, how do you think the NGB rules will advantage GB?

Campaigning for an 'extra' gender in sports seem at least as Bloody Sensible as as an 'extra' toilet or changing room. That would be a level playing field. Bonus - No end to the punditry of Trans vs.Women Vs Men , but it moves from the Feminism debate to the Sports pages.

Well I'm pleased to see it, but then I always had a good amount of faith in the governing bodies

Are you a competitive athlete? An elite one?

Believe me, ngb’s are out for one thing, medals. They don’t give a flying fuck about individuals, or athletes in general.

If putting men in womens competition will bring GB medals, and therefore lottery funding, they will have no hesitation in changing whatever rule they need to.

Male athletes shouldn't be competing against female. That's it as far as I'm concerned

I have to say that seems far simpler and fairer than worrying about testosterone levels, or whether the heavier skeleton and musculature is an advantage or a disadvantage... After all sports that are split are split by sex, not gender.

Male athletes shouldn't be competing against female. That's it

Exactly^^

Male athletes shouldn't be competing against female. That's it as far as I'm concerned.

I mean how do you adjust for it? It's madness.

For example, it's believed that elite sprinters have tended to dope off-season. In other words you build muscle using testosterone supplements when you're not competing, and then during competition you still have that extra muscle but your levels have fallen.

However a hypothetical transgender person who has not been subject to castration (which is no longer a requirement I understand) is INHERENTLY doping if they stop taking testosterone-blocking hormones. In other words by NOT doping themselves with anti-androgens, and allowing their body to produce its natural male sex hormones, they will gain the advantage from that. Are we to subject these 'dopers' to lifelong bans from competition, on the basis that 'whoops', they 'forgot' to suppress their hormones all year round, as would athletes who supplemented hormones? Or is in fact the standard much more lenient.

It's bonkers. Everyone knows you can gain massive benefit from testosterone doping, even if you don't do it in competition, so how on earth are we supposed to deal with people who have - in effect - been 'doping' since puberty, and have the consequent extra muscle mass, etc. There can be no fairness because any standard is by necessity arbitrary because there is no biological transgender marker, it's just a self-declaration.

Oh hey, look at that! A sports governing body being flexible, making changes they deem appropriate, acting in the best interests of competitors and acting on advice. You'd have thought it couldn't happen!

Well I'm pleased to see it, but then I always had a good amount of faith in the governing bodies.

I think someone upthread said they started out with with the 10mol limit; in fact they started far lower than that and actually raised the limit so as to not exclude certain intersex athletes - nothing to do with trans at all. Just as a point of accuracy. It was contentious as to whether they should have raised it in the first place; not surprised it's come back down.

Hopefully everyone's a little less apocalyptic about the sports situation now, seeing that governing bodies are demonstrably prepared to take the steps they deem appropriate to ensure fair and safe competition.

That looks like an impartial source, lol.

www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201710/profiles.cfm

"Harper is a competitive runner and for over 40 years she has been competing in races that range from 1500 meters on the track to road marathons"

"Thirteen years ago she started thinking about fitness levels of male and female athletes and wondered if anyone had studied how a person’s fitness changes when they change genders. The catalyst for this musing was her own gender transition from male to female in 2004."

And the study

"Race times from eight transgender women runners were collected over a period of seven years and, when possible, verified. "

Eight is a pathetic sample size.

If you look at the actual data they are so variant as to be obviously worthless in the context of the tiny sample. Some of the comparisons are obviously ridiculous, such as comparing the 5km time of the 24 year old biological male with the 5km time of the same person post-transition aged 53.

Others present different issues, e.g., runner Five goes from 19:39 running as a man to 23:43 as a woman over the space of some time between 1 day and 23 months (they just give the ages at the time of running rather than the actual dates, so you can't tell whether 1 day has elapsed or potentially 729 days), at the same distance (but you'd need again to adjust for weather conditions, track, etc. - the author compares to an arbitrary best ever time, without considering this), however potentially this person has undergone genital surgery - it's not stated, from which there would be a fairly long recovery period.

The evidence is right before our eyes - third-rank men become world-beaters when they transition. Trying to draw conclusions from amateurs who inevitably will be under different training, diet conditions, etc., before and after transition is thoroughly wrong-headed. The relevant question is peak performance, not a bunch of amateurs. (And that's assuming you accept that sex separated sport should be open to people of the opposite biological sex if only they comply with some arbitrary criterion, that 'inclusion' in elite sport is somehow priority (surely not - Man Utd. are not trying to 'include' everyone who is shit at football in their team).)

IF you could INTENSIVELY monitor a male athlete subject to testosterone suppression for, say, one year, and see what happened to their times subject to the same training regime, diet, etc. then that might be interesting. But this, this is worthless.

There could be a whole new Trans category, which would solve the problem completely. Still really pissed off with the idea that any men should compete against women. I am talking about competitive events...for fun I guess it really doesn't matter if everyone chooses to be inclusive. However I would also be pissed off if a women's walking netball team for example had to include men too, because we just can't say no.

crispbuttyfan Isn't long distance running a bit unusual though? Some of the top long distance runners (especially ultra-marathoners) in the world are women. For most other sports having increased height and muscle is a major advantage.

Here's another study but only taken on long distance running where it followed trans women before and after transition, and their rankings as men, where pretty much the same as they were for women post transition.

So the author states, someone who is ranked around the top 20% as a male, after transition seems to end up around the top 20% for female, they didn't suddenly jump up to the top 5%....

"Conclusions
Despite the fact that transgender women have been allowed to compete against cisgender ones
since 2004, there has been no study used to justify this decision beyond the original work of
Gooren and Bunck. It bears repeating that this original study was not undertaken on athletes, nor
7
JOURNAL OF SPORTING CULTURES AND IDENTITIES
did it directly measure any aspect of athleticism. In fact, this is the first time a study has been
developed to measure the performance of transgender athletes. The author overcame two
significant barriers which have prevented any previous study from being performed, i.e. the
difficulty in determining an appropriate metric to measure athletic performance both before and
after testosterone suppression, and the difficulty in finding enough willing study participants in
any given sport.
The author chose to use the standard age-grading methodology which is commonly used in
master’s (over forty) track meets worldwide, to evaluate the performance of eight distance
runners who had undergone gender transition from male to female. As a group, the eight study
participants had remarkably similar age grade scores in both male and female gender, making it
possible to state that transgender women run distance races at approximately the same level, for
their respective gender, both before and after gender transition.
It should be noted that this conclusion only applies to distance running and the author makes
no claims as to the equality of performances, pre and post gender transition, in any other sport.
As such, the study cannot, unequivocally, state that it is fair to allow to transgender women to
compete against 46,XX women in all sports, although the study does make a powerful statement
in favor of such a position.
It should also probably be noted that the publication of this study will likely not appreciably
change the resistance faced by transgender women who compete against cisgender ones. There
will continue to be strong opposition by athletes, parents and fans to the inclusion of transgender
women. It will take many more years before the average sports enthusiast understands that
transgender women who have undergone testosterone suppression will not dominate women’s
sports."

The full article can be found here, but it can be heavy going..

jrci.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.301/prod.4

& so can other women take testosterone up to this level?

Actually what Reddwolff said.

If they go ahead with this I presume men with naturally low testosterone levels, or who are willing to take testosterone suppressors (however they work) are going to be allowed to compete in women's events, even if they don't "identify" as women.

After all, the division is no longer "men" and "women", it's "less than 5" and "more than 5".

It's a load of shite to make people shut up about it.

The reaction to the recent weightlifting debacle was telling and I assume this is to appease that backlash.

I think by so many being able to see such an obvious example of unfairness widely televised it opened many eyes. No matter the words spoken, everyone could see the truth and began to question why this was allowed to happen.

You do all realise that the decision to lower testosterone levels is to stop women like Caster Semenyu competing without having her (natural due to a condition) level lowered.

It's not to stop men competing. Because trans men can get their levels below 5, and still have male anatomy, male muscles, male skeleton, male height and weight and strength.

The only correct conclusion to this bollocks is to stop measuring testosterone at all (except as part of the normal drug testing for cheating) and go back to saying women have to be genetically women (an easy test these days) to compete in women's events.

What does a TERF look like?

I can't speak for all TERFs but I look like a supermodel.

It's a non-change, it's still defining female to be "low testosterone" for the purposes of sport ignoring all other physiological differences and they still only have to claim to be a woman for four years for sporting purposes. So I suppose they think this sop will stop the criticisms, but it will not. There is a very clear 10% to 40% difference between male and female athletes depending on the sport and it is only sports like gymnastics or something like shooting or equestrian where it evens out because that is based on skill. It's still many more times than even a woman with an endocrine disorder would have, and still set up to advantage these men.

"There has already been studies about the efficacy of trans women on hrt vs cis standards, generally if people were more aware of the actual issue instead of just plainly trying to say no trans women should be involved."

The actual issue is they are male and don't lose that and the claims of power loss are dubious. There is no link to this chart, but I doubt it is a comparison against women or even other men as any so-called studies or claims I've read only look at pre- or post- transition (so the athlete compared with themselves) and don't account for age related declines in performance. The tiny changes in the main are not convincing at all, and as we know in weightlifting, the trans person can be 10-15 years older and at a stage where other male athletes would have moved on into Masters or other age-graded levels but still is winning against women and removing their chances to excel at their chosen sport. That tells it's own story.

What does a TERF look like?

I reckon that they have visions of them looking like the witches in the Disney (?) film of Roald Dahl's The Witches... And that when the doors shut, they peel off their normal everyday normal woman that you would recognise as a neighbour/shop assistant/school mum/etc in order to show their true demonic terfy-ness

apologies... link to my post at 9.39 was incorrect.
Discussion about self id at Boston marathon raised here:

This is welcome news. But as we all know, save for certain sports such as equestrian, it is simply not fair &/or safe for males to compete with/against females. But it is a step in the right direction.