Martina has answered!

[Yeahnahyeah]

Basically saying there needs to be open debate.
www.martinanavratilova.com/

www.martinanavratilova.com/

Great blog post with much sense. Now let's hope she gets invited to discuss this on TV.

Excellent reply - fair, measured, objective. She’s brilliant.

Very measured and well put.

Will be interesting to see the response to this.

Brava Martina! Excellent, measured, well written blog post.

(If by any remote chance you are reading this there is only one tiny but important comment I would make and that is to refer to women as a sex and not a gender. )

We are with you all the way. And gratitude to your top sporting colleagues for standing up and being counted too.

A really great response

Very measured and eminently sensible words from Martina

Might need Bowl to translate those scientific papers!

Great statement.

Fabulous. Love her.

What a fantastic statement. So amazing to see such clarity and strength though of course that is nothing less than one should expect from Martina!

Really struggling to see how anyone could read that and not agree with it least of all get angry about it?

The highest risk for transsexuality is observed in somatically male individuals carrying a short allele (S) for the ERβ polymorphism together with a G allele for XbaI-ERα and a short allele (S) for AR (SGS genotype) compared to the reference category SAS, short allele (S) for the ERβ together with an A allele for XbaI-ERα and a short allele (S) for AR. However, the differences were not significant when Bonferroni corrections were used

Last sentence... 🤦🏻‍♀️

When we bootstrapped it the significance disappeared

I dunno about this one (first paper in the list.) it’s saying there’s a correlation between one variant in one type of hormone receptor and abnormal gender identity. However it’s also saying that in some cases that significance disappears when you look at it using other statistical methods. Hmmm.
It’s possible (actually probably IMO) that there is a biological basis for all the dysphoric behaviours. however I would be very sceptical of ‘a gene for being trans.’

I’ve said it before but to me the most likely mechanism is going to be a general set of issues that lead to an increased likelihood of dysphoric behaviour. These may overlap with other conditions (for example the brain scans have shown some hints that areas implicated in fragile sense of self in schizophrenia are also involved.) so there is probably a biological predisposition to dysphoria.
The form that disphoria takes however i think is HUGELY affected by the societal conditions the person finds themselves in.

All of this applies only to genuine gender dysphoria - Not AGP.

It’s be interesting if a set of strong markers for gender dysphoria were found. I can imagine it being strongly contested by the rest of the umbrella...

Um so first paper, interesting, I’m not sure how strong the stats are and they can’t draw any conclusions on causality. But interesting.

I’ll look at the others in a bit. Good article by Martina anyway. She’s sensible, respectful and objective.

Thanks Bowl for making the science accessible

Like Bowl, I think there could be a biological basis, but it's complex, and any causal story is multi-factorial (for instance, it could be that the same biological factors lead to someone identifying as trans in a culture with very entrenched sex stereotypes, but simply as a gender non-conforming/gender bending member of their birth sex in a less sexually stereotyped society).

Nor does it answer the philosophical question "are transwomen women?" Even if one were to find a brain structure which all women had, all transwomen had and no men who didn't identify as trans had (and this is totally science fiction - that brain structure does not exist, we're always talking overlapping distributions, which due to brain plasticity, still don't answer the nature/nurture question) - even if one found such a structure, it would still be able to frame this philosophically as "we have discovered why some men feel they ought to have been born women" rather than framing at "this means these individuals are women."

Second link takes me just to a journal homepage, so not sure which paper it is.

Third is a pretty good roundup which doesn’t need interpretation - it’s wellwritten in plain English (hurrah!) It just says that there’s a big difference between normal Male and female testosterone levels. The forest plot in fig 1 is a great visual representation and shows that intersex conditions still tend to group with actual sex. It also explains why absolute testosterone levels may not be the best thing to measure in all cases. It also shows that the ‘overlap’ people talk about is due to a long tail on Male T levels at the lower end rather than a genuine overlap. Good paper.

That third paper is great and a good one for her to pick.

Great that she included scientific references. But my favourite comment is:

the communists tried to shut me up 45 years ago and look how that worked

Really hoping this is the tipping point!

Daley Thompson has just tweeted in support. Like his tweet if you're on Twitter.

The third paper is significant in that it's how those testosterone levels impact the body from early puberty onwards.

You can't adjust for the historical impact of the testosterone on the body.

This is the enormous bull elephant in the room everyone (TRAs) ignore/ don't account for.

Thanks for the translation Bowl!

Second link got me nowhere.

Share Davies ( ex swimmer) has also tweeted about transgender in sport

Sharron Davies !

I really like Sharron's wording 'those with a male sex advantage'.

That's the nub of the issue. There's devil in the detail of exactly who that will include, but it could cover anyone who has gone through puberty with male levels of testosterone, (transwomen and maybe a few intersex women) and also anyone with current testosterone levels higher than reasonable natural female levels - female dopers (obviously), maybe a few intersex women, pubescent transgirls, transmen on T).

These people should be free to compete in the mens events; if they are at a disadvantage there, then they need a different category.

I worry that the "those who have gone through male puberty can't compete" will be weaponised by trans activists into "see this is why we should give children puberty blockers and cross sex hormones earlier".

Women are not medically altered men. That's where the boundary should be kept, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, you might be right about that, ewe - but in the context of objectively establishing who has 'male advantage', pubertal development has to be a key factor.

The optics of saying a child should undergo treatment which results in (among other things) sterility on the offchance they might turn out to be an athlete are hopefully bad enough that the TRAs wouldn't go there.