Studies on HRTs effects on the body, expessly on athletic abiliy
Studies on HRTs effects on the body, expessly on athletic abiliy
Hi everyone, a friend of mine is looking for sources on this. Hopefully you can provide some.
It's a minefield. At the moment, most public research is generated by folk with ulterior motives using deliberately skewed assumptions and comparisons. The ones that aren't lack sufficient data to show meaningful conclusions.
Joanna Harper is doing work in this space, but she's in the latter category.
Going off your hint, I found this review from Harper that is pretty interesting:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865.abstract
Like you said, there’s not enough to really form solid conclusions, but it’s a nice summary of the research.
It's a good example of the sort of thing I was talking about too.
That summary you linked to isn't measuring athletic ability but it will often be talked about as if it is. What they found was that lean body mass was different to cis women, and then they imply that it leads to athletic advantage, without ever actually exploring that part.
But on average, trans womens bodies and frames are larger than cis womens. Body mass scales in a roughly cubic correlation with body size, rather than a linear manner, so measures of lean body mass area don't mean much when they don't account for that. I have no idea of all of te measured studies do account for it, or if the meta study accounted for it.
Similarly, it mentions a difference in strength, but what is that difference? Is it upper body strength? Grip strength? Arm strength? And what impact does that different have on athletic ability? That's not explored.
Studies like this are important, but they are not the answers, because they don't actually assess the thing that's being talked about, which is athletic performance. What they do is look at measures in isolation, with no understanding of how that impacts overally athletic performance, particularly in trans bodies, in which assumptions about cis bodies simply may not apply.
Yet, despite that, they are used to exclude trans folk from sports.
There isn't much data either way. For trans women at least. Lots and lots of info about muscle mass, but nothing that actually ties it to athletic ability.
Some of the other comments have mentioned Joanna Harper, who is trying, but lacks enough data to make meaningful conclusions.
I recently did a presentation on the political side of this, and one thing to note was that with 1 or 2 exceptions, not a single state legislator could identify an instance of a trans woman dominating her field (because the anti trans movement is astroturf and designed to prey on people's fear).
If you would like my sources for the presentation, DM me. I only had a couple on this subject, but some of the auxiliary sources might help too.
Here's an interesting article with a link to a report that covers many of the issues I mentioned in my earlier post