Call for scientific studies regarding sports when men compete against women

It’s great that they’re doing this but, bluntly, if they can’t find anything they haven’t looked very hard.

First two hits on googling ‘men v women sports performance’:

https://law.duke.edu/sports/sex-sport/comparative-athletic-performance/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3761733/

There are plenty more.

under the Break it down for me thread I have stashed numerous sports posts with studies, articles and policies etc from about page 25 on.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me?page=25

They said all they find is one (dodgy) study saying there is no difference when men living as women compete against women.

First you have to define "living as a woman". A lot of (US, at least) sports organisations are just making that "tick a box on the entry form".

In which case there's a lack of specific evidence about "men who tick the F box" having an advantage in the same way as there's lack of evidence that "men who are called Keith" have an advantage...

But we don't let Keiths in if anyone points that out - we assume they perform the same as other men, and wait for someone to demonstrate that Keiths are different.

Salami-slicing a category, such as "men", and claiming that we suddenly know nothing about a subset is daft. Useful, for those trying to defeat rules, but daft.

"Scientific" studies would only start to make sense when you're actually talking about very specific measures, such as hormone treatment, but then you're into a whole world of philosophical issues. The fact that you can hobble someone from a higher category doesn't mean the end result is meaningful - you're comparing peak performers in one class against impaired performers from another class.

Anyway, rather than go straight into particular "studies", I think you might do better to look at other reviews first, and then go into studies from there, because you do need to focus on the "sport" as well as the "science". (Even if you could "equalise" male performance to female doesn't mean you should).

The World Rugby stuff was good. Some links:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4096492-Excellent-podcast-on-the-process-for-developing-World-Rugby-s-transgender-policy

https://www.world.rugby/the-game/player-welfare/conferences/transgender

That last link has a good video summary by Ross Tucker of the results, shorter and more technical than his podcast, but covering a similar area.

And it also has the slide decks from all of the people presenting at their transgender conference, so you get to see the pro and anti males-in-female sport arguments.

To me, when I went through them, it seemed incredibly clear the argument strengths are not remotely comparable, and you wonder how World Rugby could ever have been in any doubt.

Even the main "scientific" proponent of this stuff, Joanna Harper, has largely given up on the scientific arguments, conceding that the male advantage can't be "equalised", but still arguing on the non-scientific "inclusion is good" grounds. (Forgetting, of course, that having a reserved female category is inclusion for women.)

Although as Motorina has said, 17-year-olds really shouldn't need their homework done for them. I could have done this when I was 17, I'm sure...

But still, I'm posting for the non-17-year-old lurkers!

Do you mean comparing women with transwomen?
There isn’t much because the transwomen keep dropping out of the studies - Harper at Loughborough Uni had a study going, but the only transwoman left in is Emily Bridges who, I think, has already stated that Emily is part of a study to show that transwomen don’t have a performance advantage over women - so that’s not exact unbiased!

Could go for the logical approach that hormones & even surgery don’t affect height or pelvic geometry, both of which give male advantages in most sports

Could go for the ‘equality’ angle, that women choosing to undergo procedures/make lifestyle choices which impact their performance levels would just have to accept that that might prevent them also being an elite athlete (and that would include pregnancy)

could point out that women’s bodies are very different from men’s, so eg transwomen don’t have to factor their menstrual cycle into training plans

could put the onus for proof where it should be - sex-based sports categories are based on biological differences. If someone wants to change that and include transwomen in women’s sport, then surely they should first have to prove that it’s safe and fair?

and all of that ignores the advantage of greater muscle mass and bone density which it is likely that transwomen still have - although there are no decent studies to show they do (and equally no studies to show they don’t) because (back to the beginning) when the results start to come in, the transwomen realise what they’re going to show and drop out of the study……

Just look at any world records for swimming or athletics. Compare a world record time in the women's to the last world championships or Olympics for men and see where the woman would have placed.

Comparing high school boys against Olympic winning Women
https://boysvswomen.com/#/

What's that boys v women site? That demonstrates high school boys can beat elite women athlete performance in almost every instance.

X- posted @Apollo441

boysvswomen.com/#/

I love this website. Compares high school boys results with Olympic women. Really simple graphics. Powerful demonstration of differences.

They could maybe watch some
footage from the last olympics. Both the mixed relay swimming and the mixed relay triathlon are very interesting.

They could also find some of the press outrage in the US in 2021 that the US completely messed up the swim relay by having a woman swim the breaststroke leg against Adam Peaty. There was just a minor difference in performance there...

When you start from the premise that women are only allowed to say no to men and have men permit them their own sports if men can be convinced by sufficient amounts of evidence (properly peer reviewed and validated) that this puts women at more of an objective, proven disadvantage that those men feel is worth the awful price of saying no to men?

Then you've already demonstrated your binary sex based sexism and there really is no need to investigate any further. Keep men out of women's sports. If you have upset men you want to please, then do something for them as a separate category, but women and their resources do not belong to men, and are not available for men to commandeer to aid the self expression of other men.

Ah shit - I have just linked loads of articles then lost it..

They should read this and really look at the justification for the sex based discrimination
https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/CAS_Executive_Summary__5794_.pdf

Read this https://equalityinsport.org/resources/index.html

Look at world records in athletics for men and women, college records in athletics for men and women.

Look at these...
https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=Harper,+2015%3B+Roberts+et+al.,+2020%3B+Harper,+2020+testosterone+suppression+athletic+performance&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

And then critically review this:

https://www.cces.ca/sites/default/files/content/docs/pdf/transgenderwomenathletesandelitesport-ascientificreview-e-final.pdf. and see why the accommodations applied to the trans gender populations in this article, should not be applied to women as a protected class...

Look at the references cited in this article as read their conclusions, the amount of evidence, the number of participants, their ages..

and then look at a large scale event which would remove the challenges associated with small scale studies and take a look at the results of the New York Marathon, by sex and age and see if they can see any patterns!

I love this quote from 'Equality in Sport', a group which was created from representatives from Sport England, Sport Wales and Sport Scotland and provides guidance to all UK sporting bodies:

'The difference in performance, even at the lower range of 10-12%, is not small in terms of competitive outcomes; and would result in Adam Peaty being beaten by half the pool length in a short-course 100m breaststroke competition, Dina Asher Smith by more than 20m in the 200m track sprint, and Sir Mo Farah being lapped twice in the 10,000m track race.'

The graphics which show how much further ahead the fastest man is compared to the fastest women, can be compelling..

If the discussion gets into hormones - it is worth pointing out that there are over 50 hormones in the body, each with differing levels of males and females,, which affect the way our bodies metabolise food, respond to stress, respond to exercise. The discussion about whether males should enter female support should not begin and end with testosterone.

I'm not quite sure what you're looking/asking for here. Men and women compete as equals in equestrian disciplines if that's any help. Of course those are more about skills than strength and physical capability.

You need the Hilton / Lundberg literature review that looked at all the evidence and the relevant studies are helpfully referenced at the bottom of the review.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

If they couldn't find anything is it because they started their research on Wikipedia or something? It might be a good teaching moment for them to become aware of the bias on whatever sources they used for their research.

That link doesn’t seem to work. Here it is again.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

Ffs still doesn’t work. Try this…

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289906/

FYI : The studies and papers are all in the break it down for me thread. Some of the articles too.

I have been banking them there as they all come out.

Check out the world athletes site; they rank world athelites.

Florence Griffeth Joyner holds the world's fastest time for a 100m: 10.49 secs.

The same time as a man ranked 6,671 fastest.

And she was doping.

They don't need studies of 'men living as women' competing against women.

There is no difference between a man and a man who claims to be a woman.

They could also mention champion female sprinter Allyson Felix; discriminated by sponor Nike when becoming pregnant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/57586382

This is not something male athletes have to factor into their training/career plans.

Florence Griffeth Joyner holds the world's fastest time for a 100m: 10.49 secs.

The same time as a man ranked 6,671 fastest.

And she was doping.

Geez... you could just present one after another of these....

There is no evidence that suppression of male hormones levels the playing field. Zero... none....

There is plenty of evidence that males outperform females... decades of it, millions upon millions of cases.. across many disciplines....