Save female sports evidence thread

[Helleofabore]

I am conscious that the Break it Down for me thread is nearly full. I am therefore hoping that this thread can be an archive thread just for the sports evidence that we can all access and refer to. Now that MNHQ has given us the option for saving threads so we can find them easily, I figure it is a good time.

Please post studies, papers, media articles that pull together references, or informative articles, tweets, videos. Just on sport, the latest policies around sport.

I don't want to be the thread police, but ask that we keep this free of discussion. Can I ask that if you want to discuss something you see here, you start a thread to do so?

Because I would like this to be just information stashed so that people can find the links easily so they also know where to start. And getting into discussion on this thread will mean it will fill up.

Thanks.

ABOUT FEMALE BRAIN STRUCTURE AND CONCUSSION

Tweet from Dr Emma Hilton

x.com/fondofbeetles/status/2046635369664319628?s=46

“If you grow male brain neurones and female brain neurones on a plate, then subject them to injury via stretching, the female neurones "break" earlier and the male neurones recover quicker, because they activate a stronger and more efficient inflammatory response.

Female brains are more fragile under injury conditions, and they don't recover as well.”

Plus an article from the Irish Times

https://www.irishtimes.com/health/your-family/2026/04/21/pink-concussion-how-womens-brain-injuries-differ-biologically-from-mens/

https://archive.is/R0wo8

in this article, US neurologist Dr Beth McQuiston states:

“When it comes to the biology of concussion, there are three main differences between men and women that we know of, she explains in a video call from her home in Chicago. “Women tend to have less muscular necks. So when an injury occurs, say whether it’s a car accident or if it’s on a pitch, there is less support here,” she says, putting hands up to either side of her neck.

Secondly, there is a difference in the microarchitecture of the brain. Women have more neurons crossing the corpus callosum – a structure in the middle of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres – and they are thinner.

A third factor is the menstrual cycle. “Given the same woman at a different time, exact same injury, there can be a different outcome, depending on whether progesterone levels are high or low. It is worse if it is in the luteal phase [ie after ovulation, approximately days 15-28 of a 28-day cycle], when the progesterone levels are high and then all of a sudden they drop abruptly.” This is due to the effect of the trauma on the pituitary gland, right in the centre of the head.

“That is very intriguing,” says McQuiston. “We’re looking at studies right now, [asking] can someone be on a certain type of oral contraception, or can they take a certain kind of medication, to attenuate that drop if they had a concussion?”

Research indicates women have more post-concussive symptoms and usually take longer to recover. “

2019 PRESS RELEASE FROM THE IAAF

IAAF publishes briefing notes and Q&A on Female Eligibility Regulations

https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=fd2923ad-992f-4e43-9a70-78789d390113.pdf&urlslug=IAAF%2520Eligibility%2520Regulations%2520for%2520the%2520Female%2520Classification%2520%255BAthletes%2520with%2520Differences%2520of%2520Sex%2520Development%255D%2520in%2520force%2520as%2520from%25208%2520May%25202019

Here are some FAQs

worldathletics.org/news/press-release/questions-answers-iaaf-female-eligibility-reg

IAAF 07 MAY 2019

The following is the regulations they published at the time

1. Which athletes fall under the DSD regulations?

The DSD regulations only apply to individuals who are:

• legally female (or intersex) and
• who have one of a certain number of specified DSDs, which mean that they have:
• male chromosomes (XY) not female chromosomes (XX)
• testes not ovaries
• circulating testosterone in the male range (7.7 to 29.4 nmol/L) not the (much lower) female range (0.06 to 1.68 nmol/L); and
• the ability to make use of that testosterone circulating within their bodies (i.e., they are ‘androgen-sensitive’).

(note: the above is a good indication that the IAAF at the time fully understood that this specific group of people were male!)

2. What do such athletes have to do to be eligible to compete in the female classification?

If they are competing below international level, they do not have to do anything. They can compete without restriction.

If they are competing at international level, in one of the affected events (track races between 400m and one mile in distance), they first have to lower the level of testosterone in their blood down to below 5 nmol/L (because that is the highest level that a healthy woman with ovaries would have) for a period of six months, and maintain it below that level while they continue to compete at international level in such events.

If they want to compete at international level in other events, again they can compete without restriction, i.e., without lowering their testosterone levels.
To lower their testosterone levels in this way, affected athletes can either (a) take a daily oral contraceptive pill; or (b) take a monthly injection of a GnrH agonist; or (c) have their testes surgically removed (a ‘gonadectomy’). It is their choice whether or not to have any treatment, and (if so) which treatment to have. In particular, the IAAF does not insist on surgery. The effects of the other two treatments are reversible if and when the athlete decides to stop treatment.

Importantly, lowering testosterone in one of these ways is the recognised ‘gender-affirming’ standard of care for any individual (athlete or not) who is 46 XY but has a female gender identity.

7. Why are you targeting one athlete / How big a problem is this in the sport?

Some commentators have suggested that the regulations were (and have always been) directed at an individual athlete. That is not true. The IAAF is bound by strict confidentiality and so simply cannot – and will not – disclose the number of other athletes affected, or the identities of those athletes.

We have seen in a decade and more of research that approximately 7.1 in every 1000 elite female athletes in our sport are DSD athletes with very high testosterone levels in the male range. The majority of those athletes compete in the restricted events covered by the regulations. This frequency of DSD individuals in the elite athlete population is around 140 times higher than you will find in the general female population, and their presence on the podium is much more frequent even than this. The CAS accepted that this demonstrates, in statistical terms, that they have a significant performance advantage.

just to highlight this.

"We have seen in a decade and more of research that approximately 7.1 in every 1000 elite female athletes in our sport are DSD athletes with very high testosterone levels in the male range. The majority of those athletes compete in the restricted events covered by the regulations. This frequency of DSD individuals in the elite athlete population is around 140 times higher than you will find in the general female population, and their presence on the podium is much more frequent even than this."

https://worldathletics.org/news/press-release/questions-answers-iaaf-female-eligibility-reg

Even in 2019 the IAAF knew and still prioritised some male people over female athletes.

The Welsh FA have finally changed their eligibility policy
https://faw.cymru/news/changes-approved-to-eligibility/

Kicking and screaming but one by one they are being forced to acknowledge thr Supreme Court decision. It will be a long road but the direction of travel in one way.

It's always enlightening to do a simple word count on these articles. "Trans" (either as a prefix or a separate word) is used 5 times, e.g. "FAW has engaged with transgender participants"; "women" or "women", or even "female" - take a wild guess now.... yes you're right, 0 times.

FEMALE TENNIS PLAYERS ASKED ABOUT SEX SCREENING IN TENNIS

Aryna Sabalenka

https://x.com/pavyg/status/2085440316820058469?s=46

Jess Pegula

x.com/pavyg/status/2085310277763964948?s=46

Belinda Bencic

x.com/pavyg/status/2085442779350466806?s=46

Mirra Andreeva

https://x.com/archaicmind3000/status/2085360982646292852?s=46

CocoGauff

https://x.com/i/status/2085419381173960813

LTA widens support for womens game to all levels of competitive matches

British tennis bans transgender women from all competitive female matches

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/e2a47b30e80f5b95

A PLEA FROM ACTIVISTS THAT THE PUBLIC OPINION IS ‘HARDENING’

There are quite a few inconsistencies in this article, including how supposedly children’s sex categories for sport don’t matter while calling for organisations to follow the science (which shows that advantage exists even in prepubescent children …)

in particular it says this:

“Public opinion is hardening against trans women playing in sports, and it has triggered a witch hunt that is threatening to infect every aspect of trans life.”

I have copied and pasted most of the abridged article below without changing the formatting.

https://x.com/searchlightinst/status/2094855730511909069?s=46

Mara Keisling, a senior fellow at Searchlight and the founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, gives her thoughts on Sophie Cunningham's latest comments — as more and more conservative pundits amplify them over the course of this week.

You can read her full piece (https://www.wordsinsearchlight.org/p/dont-turnover-trans-sports-to-sophie)
and abridged below.

As someone who’s been in the trans activism space for decades, I’m of two minds about it. First, young trans kids should be able to compete in the sports leagues of their choosing.
If the children are prepubescent, it couldn’t affect the competitive integrity of the league, so there is simply no reason why they should not be able to play with their friends. Cunningham’s comments don’t recognize that nuance.

There is also nowhere in the United States where young girls play sports against biological men, and there is not and should not be anywhere that adult men share locker rooms or take showers with young girl athletes. No one finds that acceptable.

On the other hand, I think the trans community should recognize that when we go beyond prepubescent youth sports, many sports leagues, including the WNBA, need eligibility rules. And many, if not most, people in the United States honestly do worry about and object to trans women having a competitive advantage in women’s sports.

A recent poll from Pew found that 73% of voters said they were uncomfortable with trans athletes competing on sports teams that do not match their sex at birth.

In the greater scheme of trans issues, this is not even close to the most important topic. But it has become the primary way the typical American hears about our cause. It is also the issue that has been used to bludgeon trans people and supportive Democrats. Competitive sports matter in our society and we need to be pragmatic about that.

Transgender women and girls playing on women’s or girls’ teams is a relatively new issue, but public opinion has moved rapidly against it. So much so that I cannot imagine that we will be able to win the issue for the foreseeable future. In fact, I think trying to argue for participation in elite sports will only turn more Americans against trans rights and empower anti-trans politicians to attack us.

Here are the guidelines I would propose:

• Decisions should be made by sports associations and leagues based on legitimate safety and fairness concerns. Politicians should stay out of it as much as possible, and worry about protecting all of their constituents and especially all children.

• There should be no un-American blanket bans on any type of person. Rather, specific participation decisions should be made according to the age of the athlete and the particular sport they are playing.

• Decisions should be based on science and common sense, not on scare tactics that talk about strong men playing and showering with young girls. People should focus on the real issues of safety and fairness.

• Science should continue studying the effects of testosterone on sports performance.

• And lastly, the youngest children should be allowed to play in a safe and fair way without getting caught up in shameful political posturing.

Public opinion is hardening against trans women playing in sports, and it has triggered a witch hunt that is threatening to infect every aspect of trans life. On sports in particular, it has harmed trans children who just want to play sports with their friends. Prepubescent children should be exempted from these bans, which are made by the wrong people.

(the article goes on)

• Decisions should be based on science and common sense, not on scare tactics that talk about strong men playing and showering with young girls. People should focus on the real issues of safety and fairness.

Madly contradictory. Almost as though they don’t know the meanings of the words “safe” and “fair”.

The image below is useful for understanding how males with DSD 5-ARD may be misidentified as females at birth, especially in countries with poor health services. The micropenis is assumed to be a "phalliform clitoris" and the blind vaginal pouch is assumed to be a vagina (without a cervix or uterus).
At puberty the internal testes produce large amounts of testosterone and the 5-ARD male undergoes virilisation. This combined with absence of menstruation, means that adult males with 5-ARD know they are males, but some countries use the erroneous female birth certificate to their advantage by having these males compete in the female category (Semenya, et al.)

I was asked on a thread recently about males with CAIS and how they should be regarded. Obviously CAIS is a male-specific DSD, but I don't believe they undergo virilisation at puberty do they?

No, they don't and I think that athletes with CAIS are an exception that the IOC makes for participation in female sports. However, I think that there is still some research to be done on whether the presence of a Y chromosome does confer other advantages and I think that there is also an issue with where to draw the line between PAIS (which is partial androgen insensitivity syndrome) and CAIS (complete insensitivity).

This is not a discussion thread. Please start a thread to discuss anything from this thread. It takes up valuable space and makes the thread less useful.

Apologies for being rude.

THE PARKRUN IS FAILING FEMALES VIDEO (2024 ) AND SAVE WOMEN’S SPORTS VIDEO (2025)

The ‘Parkrun is failing’ video briefly goes through the argument of ‘it is not a competition’ and describes how by including male people in the female category, parkrun is the very opposite of being ‘inclusive’.

It is similar to this ‘Save Women’s Sports’ video

Mara says, "I'm here with a lot of my fellow sex realists. We are quietly protesting against parkrun's gender self ID categories. Any male if he says he's a woman or even if he doesn't say he's a woman, any male is welcome in the female category."

"Official results are published every week in descending order of speed. The rankings mean in reality it is a race and that is unfair for women and girls."

And then

"You can call it anything you like, but the facts of Parkrun are, measured courses, start and finish line."

Other brave women also keep raising the valid points such as:

"it's a race if you run it like a race"

and

"That opportunity to treat it like a race should be there for everybody because it is there for men"

https://x.com/mara_yamauchi/status/2096144220176171058?s=46

Here is a good analysis by Mara of how male people entering as female athletes impact others.

“Parkrun: good illustration today of how self-ID corrupts age grade rankings.

A male in his 60s ran parkrun in Australia in the Female category. If he’d run in the Male category, he’d have been 6th in the age grade rankings with a score just over 70%. But because he ran in the Female category, his age grade score was just over 86%. This rocketed him up to the top spot by a massive margin (well over 10%).

The runners who got bumped down were:

1. A young man who was 1st to finish so he was robbed of being 1st by time and 1st by age grade.

2. A woman in her 60s who’s a devoted parkrunner & has done >100 parkruns;

3. A man in his 60s, also devoted & is close to having done 200 parkruns;

4. A woman who, despite being in her 40s, was near the top of the Female finishing order. She’s done >70 parkruns;

5. A man who, despite being in his 50s, was near the top of the Male finishing order. He’s done >50 parkruns.

All these very good runners who are devoted parkrunners suffering unfairness & being robbed of their hard-earned place in the age grade rankings, and all for what? So that parkrun can indulge the beliefs of men who say they are women. So much unfairness inflicted on men & women bc parkrun can’t bring itself to say no to these men & implement sex at birth categories.”

Just spotted this on Reddit. 31 year old male competing against girls as young as 14 in Canadian hockey league

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news%2Fvictoria%2Ftransgender-hockey-player-dominates-womens-league-sparking-safety-fears-for-schoolgirls%2Fnews-story%2F6652fe4f2d78cb2a96940ddbaf506522

I reckon this would do well with its own thread Lalgarh. This one is just for linking studies, statistics, significant policy changes and expert opinion that supports protecting female sports categories or is important to highlight and keeping it easy to find that information.

If you start a thread, I will be very happy to join you on it.

Do you think a general Canada LGBTQ thread might work? I'm not there myself by the way and I've not been following the sports thing very closely

DETECTING SEX CATEGORY BY GAIT STUDY

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00320/full

Table 2 shows that sex can be identified from gait by the study cohort with 65% accuracy just from dots on the joints over a 3.8 second duration.

To be clear, 65% accuracy from dots over a less than 4 second duration! It was still over 60% accuracy from 0.4 seconds.

This is a fairly handy graphic. It is basic and is not showing q-angles but it communicates the basics.

Abstract
This paper explores in parallel the underlying mechanisms in human perception of biological motion and the best approaches for automatic classification of gait. The experiments tested three different learning paradigms, namely, biological, biomimetic, and non-biomimetic models for gender identification from human gait. Psychophysical experiments with twenty-one observers were conducted along with computational experiments without applying any gender specific modifications to the models or the stimuli. Results demonstrate the utilization of a generic memory based learning system in humans for gait perception, thus reducing ambiguity between two opposing learning systems proposed for biological motion perception. Results also support the biomimetic nature of memory based artificial neural networks (ANN) in their ability to emulate biological neural networks, as opposed to non-biomimetic models. In addition, the comparison between biological and computational learning approaches establishes a memory based biomimetic model as the best candidate for a generic artificial gait classifier (83% accuracy, p < 0.001), compared to human observers (66%, p < 0.005) or non-biomimetic models (83%, p < 0.001) while adhering to human-like sensitivity to gender identification, promising potential for application of the model in any given non-gender based gait perception objective with superhuman performance.

USA RUGBY CEO INTERVIEW ON THE CHANGES TO WOMEN’S SPORTS

An interview between two male people. This is enlightening in how this CEO prioritises male people and how he emotional he is that some male people will be negatively impacted by the change.

https://x.com/JenniferSey/status/2099266309892784427/video/1?s=46

note: the music has been added by ICONS.

How about this.

1. You could fit all the decent trans athletes at college level and above in the USA on a minibus. And lots would be trans men.
2. When trans women & girls were banned from grassroots football in the whole of the UK, 28 were found to be playing. In many areas, there were none at all.
3. Most trans children do no sport at all, because they're scared. Even Parkrun isn't safe for them.
4. Women are amazing. We have fought to be given equal access to table sports,& games, and are now being told that we're not as good as men and never can be. That it's not parental expectation, inequality of access at teenage level, sexism, male hostility, care responsibilities and financial pressures which keep women from playing games like chess, it's being born female. That is a massive, massive step backwards.
5. There's already sex testing in sport and trans women have been banned from Olympics down to grassroots level. The only trans woman ever to gain a medal remains Caitlyn Jenner.
6. Trans women are a tiny minority and very few of them do sport, let alone at elite level - from which they are already banned. Yet the obsession with them remains, despite the huge damage it is doing to the perception of women's sporting excellence.
7. The biggest issues in women's sport are equality of access, prize equality, equality of access to coaching, sexism and predatory cis male coaches.
8. The lack of trans athletes in women's sport has led to a massive feeding frenzy every time a woman (almost always a woman of colour) is rumoured to be a man in disguise. Even though there is sex testing in sport. Where is JK Rowling's apology to Lin Yu Ting for calling her a man and accusing her of VAWG, for example? These frenzies happen because there are no trans women in sport, but the hunger to take a woman apart for the crime of perceived masculinity, remains. It used to be because they were alleged to be gay, now it's because they're alleged to be evil men in disguise. Go figure.
9. Please directly support women's sport. Go to women's cricket, it's an amazing day out - and current equality of access to coaching means women are breaking records every single year. Show that it's supported and get us a proper Ashes series, which the women fully deserve.

10. Any decent female runner will easily outpace a random trans woman turning up to Parkrun. Stop talking down elite female athletes. 11. Transitioned trans women lose most of their physical advantage over cis women. No transitioned female athletes have ever won an Olympic medal, when they were allowed to compete. Or even got close. 12. Cis men do not value women's sporting prizes, and are not turning up in droves untransitioned in pink shorts with the aim of stealing our (usually rubbish) trophies. This is a myth used to justify transphobia. 13. Just because you feel repulsed to see a woman doing mild exercise while dressed in her normal running gear, does not mean she is committing a crime. 14. Women are amazing. Look how we're doing in endurance events. Don't help men exclude us from challenging for the big money in table sports. 15. That list of trans women who've won in 'female events'? It includes the trans woman who won Jeopardy! And hot dog eating contests, a whole host of tame games and not much else.

Cheers.