Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events

Apologies for the ridiculous article, but it contains good news. Nike will no longer be funding a study on "trans girls" competing in female sport

https://www.outsports.com/2025/11/11/24121287/joanna-harper-trans-women-athletes-research-nike/?fbclid=Iwb21leAOBcFdjbGNrA4FwUWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHp9fDdIe_mktQhYjj1MmkltXViWerTaXaIIOTENnzZSh9ORZWncZyGBvyS3g_aem_-mJrLxNQ1sUGBxt25qv9yQ

She found a remarkably lucrative grift.

I can’t decide whether she really has bought into the whole trans thing or whether she sees a business opportunity that is ripe for exploiting (to the max).

Transmen (females) can take T (anabolic steroid - a banned substance) if they have a Therapeutic Use Exemption and under medical supervision. So they can take part in men’s / open competitions.

She seems to be an extreme example of how badly wrong people’s brains can go. I’d be fascinated are to know what happens.

Is it the severe mental strain of holding so many conflicting ideas at the same time?

It’s hard to think that Webberley actually has a medical degree.

Let’s hope that Webberley doesn’t have to be relied upon to explain the need for prostate exams to the likes of Gavin.

Apologies, I meant to tag @MyObservations

Not me. I don’t think I have ever used the term sex change surgery on MN.

I think the point here is that there have been so very many terms used over time, and so very many different types of trans women all the way from declaring themselves as female, through living (as best they can) as a woman, to undergoing surgery. It can be very hard indeed to keep up with all the types & names, I assumed that @Helleofabore was trying to say that what is now called gender reassignment surgery was commonly called sex change surgery in the past.

Yes it may have been a clumsy term, but anyone not up to date with this subject may well not realise that these terms as commonly used at the time mean approximately the same thing.

@Helleofabore Interesting link, thanks. Not an entire surprise given that males experience three main surges of androgenisation - in utero, neonatal, & pubertal.

Wishful thinking is not "facts". "Sex change surgery" is a physical impossibility despite that antiquated term having once had some currency.

I can’t wait for the debate with Helen Joyce. If it happens.

She's completely off her rocker and now all she's looking for is engagement.

I tend to take her furious posts as a good sign that the world is righting itself.

When she’s happy there’s normally something evil happening.

I agree. No large scale research will ever be done. I doubt that any research directly on athletes will be done. For a start, they would have to find a group of healthy male athletes who has received puberty blockers from before puberty started, that alone is going to be hard enough to find. However, there may well be some rare athletes competing that can be tracked.

Instead, what I suspect will be more likely to happen will be academic papers giving expert opinion on what physical advantages will not be prevented with blocking puberty.

I think that the discussion for now had settled on 'male puberty' as a distinction for discussions and in the future it will be expanded. I have noticed that the IOC news items yesterday mention 'puberty'.

A weakened and castrated boy is not the same as a girl.

There will never be definitive research. There are a few people doing small scale stuff but at the end of the day, who would be funding large scale research and why? It's not going to happen.

Secondly, we can't guarantee that trans athletes won't reduce their performance in the tests in order to give the research the results they want.

So trans activists will continue to claim we can't ban trans women because there is no research. And they will seize on tiny research studies that show what they want.

Instead, we should ignore them and focus instead on the data from real athletes - comparing race times etc.

All this stuff about grip strength etc is irrelevant against the bigger picture of actual results.

I find it interesting to contrast Semenya with the Austrian skier Erik Schinegger. He also fathered children and tried to compete in the men's event when he found out the truth about himself.

It looks like he'd have had a good chance of winning, but he was forbidden from changing to the men's category after winning in the women's, I recall.

Thanks for that, Helleofabore - I will save that link.

Yes. Greg Brown and team have been working their way through reviewing USA child sports results. I have stashed the links in the archive thread.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5142027-save-female-sports-evidence-thread?page=4

The thread also has links to the Australian, Greek and I think a Danish child sports review as well.

There has been consistently a difference between female and male children sports performances from around 6 years old. Plus a disc golf advantage from 10 years old as per Tommy Lundberg's recent research.

As more and more organisations return to dividing sport by sex rather than gender, professional trans athletes will eventually become a thing of the past. I predict TRAs will try to use that to their advantage. They'll hope that Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard, etc. will fade from public consciousness - and when people do bring them up, they'll say, "You're still going on about Lia Thomas? Christ, you're stuck in 2022. Do you have any idea how much hormone therapy has advanced since then?"

Hormonal changes aren't enough to level the playing field. A lot of the differences in male and female bodies are the result of DNA.

"The simple fact is that if someone has gender reassignment before puberty, they take on the strengths and weaknesses of their new gender."

I agree Bundle and others, I would love to see the evidence that supports this claim. Because, that does seem overly simplistic.

Perhaps as myobservations has said that they have been heavily involved in the topic for a long time, they might have some studies or papers that they can provide that show that a male child who has had their puberty suppressed before it even starts has the strengths and weaknesses that female people have.

I mean with the obvious exception of that male person never having to deal with menstruation impacts on the body or pregnancy. Which is actually a significant advantage that we are really only just starting to research properly.

It is also important to note that Q-angles have been noted to be an osteological factor and if puberty suppression doesn't then impact on height and those femurs grow longer as per genetic coding, Q-angles will also remain another advantage that male people who have had their testosterone driven puberty completely suppressed before puberty will have.

Of course, how many pre pubertal male children are put on puberty blockers before any testosterone puberty has even started to impact their development. I would be hesitant to think that any research can be done on an individual to assess to what extent testosterone has impacted their body in puberty.

And if any male child has access to more testosterone than the testosterone range in healthy girls , then very strictly speaking, they have had a competitive benefit that was never available to a female athlete.

Obviously, more academic papers will come out about this and I will be interested to see the outcomes.