Emily Bridges claims there is no advantage in sport

For swimming, our national development squad distance times (400m+) for girls are slightly faster than for boys aged 11/12 - but for older age groups / post puberty y then the boys times rapidly become much faster.

Actually there are some statistics which appear to show that advantage does exist pre puberty. Statistics from US schools athletics shows almost all records to be held by boys and British Athletics statistics seem to corroborate this. Difference is much less and may be affected by societal considerations but interesting all the same. Post puberty the difference between boys and girls is huge.

@lunar1 It's not true that, pre puberty, boys are automatically physically better than girls at sport. It depends on which sport, training and drive. One of my DDs could out-swim anyone up to 11 in her school at breaststroke - she'd been swimming since 2, had the technique and determination. However, when puberty struck and boys started benefiting from the hormones laid down since birth for muscle development and growth, she slipped down the ratings. She was not one of those taller than boys until puberty strikes.

My point is that prepuberty (1) most male bodies have been laying down the hormones from birth that will surge in puberty. (2) post puberty those physical advantages will come into play (3) we await world wide science to prove or disprove that even with hormone treatment, male born people retain a physique that outdoes women in most sports (though not, it seems in ultra running or things involving horses or mountains!)

Sports bodies should be funding independent research now - I know some sports bodies are rowing back from TWAW and trying to work out what to do - the levels some sports expected TW to get on hormone levels is far above what women have.

Meanwhile, Lou Englefield (PrideSportsUK) failing to realise why Jake Daniels gets overwhelming support and Bridges … not so much.

All those thousands of pounds going into research to try and prove there’s no male performance advantage, that could be put to better use by studying the female athletes issues and reducing the knowledge gap but no. Men come first as usual.

There was an article on the BBC yesterday
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61591417

All about sport training and menstrual cycles. The article points out how very little evidence there is for the effect of menstruation on sporting performance. Which when women are competing against each other you could argue broadly evens out.

With regards to Emily being the same. Emily is never going to experience the variation in performance caused by a hormonal cycle, never going to have to accommodate a period during a race, I could go on, but you get the picture. We barely know this information about women as a baseline for comparison to start with because most sports science has been for and about men.

But there must be other trans women who are not doing all this egocentric stuff. We just don't hear about them.

Yes, it's unfortunately true that transwomen who do respect women's rights rarely make the news. (Well, except in cases like Miranda Yardley being taken to court for transphobia). Getting on with your life without trampling on women's rights doesn't make column inches.

Yes. This.
why are people trying to deny what is patently obvious to 99% of people.to not recognise males have an advantage in almost every sport is pure delusion.

Totally rubbish re archery. Men still have an advantage.

The only sport that is, and still should be, open for men and women to compete together is equestrian.

Where is the corresponding stampede of trans men demanding access to male competitions and winning them? Surely that alone is good enough evidence this is an entirely one-sided patriarchal grab at something that belongs to women.

Yes. But these males have been not only told it is as it should because they are women, but also been told their reduced performance makes them competitive to women.

Bridges reality is they failed to make the men’s GB team so with all that lovely love and support have been allowed to believe their conversion is fair. Ie. Not making the males, transition and then make the females. All ok….

People who have a well adjusted concept of fairness would of course understand they have unfair advantage.

And I will leave it there to what I would say about being a well adjusted person as I won’t risk deletion. Like Joan Collins did.

What Emily Bridges and others doing this might feel is that they identify as women but certainly not with women?

Yes, indeed. They're not identifying with women, per se, but with an imagined simulacra of 'femininity'.

I couldn't understand this at all, because when I try to empathise with these athletes by imagining myself in the shoes of someone wishing to transition from male to female I would never ever do what Laurel Hubbard and Lia Thomas and others have done: Barge into women's elite sports and take over.

It would make me feel deeply ashamed, as I would know what advantages my body conveys me, and I also would not want to injure my new sisterhood by beating them in an unfair manner.

Absolutely agree - this is what I struggle with, as well.

I try to empathise and imagine what it must feel like to be a man and think you’re a women.

But by behaving like Hubbard, Bridges, et al - all it does is steadfastly confirm in my mind that they’re 100% unmitigated men.

I couldn't understand this at all, because when I try to empathise with these athletes by imagining myself in the shoes of someone wishing to transition from male to female I would never ever do what Laurel Hubbard and Lia Thomas and others have done: Barge into women's elite sports and take over.

It would make me feel deeply ashamed, as I would know what advantages my body conveys me, and I also would not want to injure my new sisterhood by beating them in an unfair manner.

Maybe this sounds trivial, but I keep circling back to this odd focus on themselves at the expense of everybody else.

But there must be other trans women who are not doing all this egocentric stuff. We just don't hear about them.

What Emily Bridges and others doing this might feel is that they identify as women but certainly not with women?

Emma Hilton, Ross Tucker and Jon Pike (all on Twitter under their names) are all excellent on this topic.

Tucker pointed out in one of his tweets that it's not the testosterone the transitioning athlete has now or during the last year which matters the most, but the testosterone that has affected that athlete's body over the years, causing a male puberty, creating a permanently larger heart, heavier bones etc.

In other words, it is not really possible to reverse the advantages of going through male puberty gives someone.

The segregation in many sports is based on average sex differences. It's not based on gender identities, and it makes no sense to use identities on the basis of segregating events. Might as well use favourite colours or political beliefs.

🤣 That’s a leap too far for the TWAW crowd.

Speaking of own goals, this is a tweet today from Bridges’ mum.
Why would the female riders be training with the U23 mens squad? What could possibly be the reason women would want to train with and against men? C’mon Bridges’ mum, you’re almost there.

“Sport acts as a microcosm to the rest of society, so with the patriarchal structure that exists in the rest of society, that's intensified in sport.”

What a glorious own goal that statement is.

I believe Harpers funding came from the IOC, which is shocking when you think about how unscientific it is.

www.outsports.com/platform/amp/2019/3/13/18262451/ioc-olympics-fund-research-transgender-athletes

No physical advantage, just another typical lady

That they got funding for this despite the dreadfully poor study design is exactly because of ideological capture. This is the real problem. We are told things about various studies and about statistics on, say, homicide rates of transgender individuals which are untrue in the objective sense.

But there is no public debate about any of this because debate is viewed as an attempt to erase the existence of transgender people.

Obsessed with cycling from an early age.
Struggles socially with their peers.
Through a combination of bad luck and injury sees their Olympic place disappear.
Decides then to "transition"

Emily, you need to move on with your life. You can't take a woman's place. And the ridiculously filtered photos will do your self esteem no good either. You also aren't a lesbian, no good will come of any of this.

"Here, we report that current evidence shows the biological advantage, most notably in terms of muscle mass and strength, conferred by male puberty and thus enjoyed by most transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed as per current sporting guidelines for transgender athletes."

From this pubmed source - www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/

That was kind of the other men to include Emily on the team when by her own admission her performances have deteriorated so very badly since they started to transition. Maybe there are lots of kind men in mens cycling who are happy to include Emily in team cycling events so she can fulfil her cycling dreams and continue to look pretty in photographs.

In that pic of Emily and team mates you can see Emily is the biggest of them, despite crouching a little and wearing pigtails. And that's the MALE team!