Talk:Transgender people in sports

Use better, less impartial source and quotation for UK "post-secondary education" section

Under "Post-secondary education", the section on the UK is incorrect and solely refers to one lawyer's opinion. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission disagrees with this assessment. The text currently says: "Under the Equality Act 2010, discrimination based on sex or gender reassignment is illegal, but certain sporting activities are exempt if transgender athletes competing would put non-transgender athletes at an unfair disadvantage. It does not apply to those who consider themselves trans or non-binary, but have not undergone gender reassignment officially.[180]"

The EHRC is a QUANGO which says, "In the Equality Act, gender reassignment means proposing to undergo, undergoing or having undergone a process to reassign your sex.

"To be protected from gender reassignment discrimination, you do not need to have undergone any medical treatment or surgery to change from your birth sex to your preferred gender.

"You can be at any stage in the transition process, from proposing to reassign your sex, undergoing a process of reassignment, or having completed it. It does not matter whether or not you have applied for or obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate, which is the document that confirms the change of a person's legal sex."

Therefore, the claim that you have to "[undergo] gender reassignment officially" seems to be a misleading interpretation, as: i) there is no "official" way to undergo gender reassignment; ii) even if there were, you don't need to have "undergone" (past tense) the process for the law to apply. You merely need to "propose" to undergo or have begun to undergo such a process.

I think we should remove this link and use the EHRC one instead. Moreover, the current source uses several anti-trans dogwhistles like "natal" instead "cis" and "trans-women" instead of "trans women", suggesting this is a "gender critical" lawyer.

-- no, I think that's a bad idea. "Natal" isn't any more of a dogwhistle than "cis" itself. The only people who use the term "cis" are trans ideologues. Normal people just call them women/men and trans-women/trans-men. No one uses the term 'cis', and that term is only used as a dogwhistle for political extremists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:3D08:778A:2400:85E6:3F58:4A3E:7F93 (talk) 00:04, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Testosterone and athletic ability

I have again removed an argument that was logically incorrect (it was a straw man). Logically fallacious statements are incorrect, no matter who they are stated by, citation or no citation. Thus I feel that such arguments have no place in a section that is meant to be about the objective effect of testosterone and athletic ability. Furthermore, the following paragraph made the same point that the quote was trying to make, but was objective about it and did not make a straw-man argument in the process. Feel free to undo the revision, but if you do, please link me somewhere that says a statement being incorrect is not grounds for removal. Notsononymous (talk) 14:38, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The study in the BMJ that is cited is hugely problematic in its conclusion, as it ignored the fact that the trans women it measured were 11 percent faster than the average *men* in their age cohort, and then were 12 percent faster than the average *women* in their age cohort afterwards. They went from 55th percentile among men (age/sex ranked cohort) to 56th percentile (age/sex ranked) among women, showing they ended up in the same percentile of performance after transition, which should ideally be the whole point. Conversely, the trans women lost all sit-up and pull-up advantages, and this did match the female cohort. The conclusion is objectively biased toward finding *some* retained advantage, because a neutral comparison would find all *sex-linked* differences were lost. 216.152.184.30 (talk) 19:12, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

With only a 5% muscle decrease, men who transition to women do have an advantage a year later. A year is not enough time to preserve the fairness of the sport between the two genders. The study is linked here https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/105/3/e805/5651219 Contrarian13 (talk) 04:00, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

The study you linked does not make that claim. In fact it explicitly makes the point that more data is necessary to draw any conclusions about possible advantages.

“We acknowledge that this study was conducted with untrained individuals and not transgender athletes. Thus, while this gave us the important opportunity to study the effect of the cross-hormone treatment alone, and as such the study adds important data to the field, it is still uncertain how the findings would translate to transgender athletes undergoing advanced training regimens during the gender-affirming intervention. It is also important to recognize that we only assessed proxies for athletic performance, such as muscle mass and strength. Future studies are needed to examine a more comprehensive battery of performance outcomes in transgender athletes.” MarcoBarroca (talk) 05:56, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

The arguments you removed seem to be back in the page without the context you provided. Have a look Bangbangles (talk) 18:04, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

After seeing a competition where a transgender female athlete won, with embarrassing ease, distancing all opponents by half a lap, I think it's true that a female transgender athlete has more advantages than a woman; however, Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and we need one or more valid sources. To be precise, I largely agree with the participation of trans people in sport, but it would certainly be right to create a separate category. JacktheBrown (talk) 00:22, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

How would one anecdote prove anything. It could also be that a cis woman born with amazing genetics and training could have performed the same as the trans woman against the other participants. Another category is telling trans women that they are socially not women enough when science hasnt said that Bangbangles (talk) 12:12, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

@Bangbangles: in my opinion, this problem could be solved by creating a category for each sport for all trans people; otherwise, situations similar to that of Lia Thomas, who is banned from participating in the 2024 Summer Olympics, could occur in the future. JacktheBrown (talk) 08:23, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

@Bangbangles: another example: before participating in the women's competitions, Laurel Hubbard didn't receive medals; then, magically, one silver medal and three gold medals. Trying to deny the truth is very disappointing and, above all, not encyclopedic. JacktheBrown (talk) 00:13, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

What’s encyclopedic is making sure the information is evidence based and of statistical significance. You can cite 100 trans champions and I can give you 101 trans mediocre athletes. Do you want to include them all in the article?

Anecdotes are completely pointless in this discussion. And shouldn’t belong in the article.

Here are some more for you: https://www.outsports.com/2019/12/3/20990763/trans-women-athlete-sports-winning-losing-transgender/ MarcoBarroca (talk) 13:38, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

@MarcoBarroca: no, they aren't useless anecdotes; they have no value for you, but you don't represent the entire world population. Laurel Hubbard achieved important results (one silver and three gold medals) only with the transition from man to woman; and I could cite other similar cases. Let's stop not seeing the evidence! JacktheBrown (talk) 14:05, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Reference [80] looks questionable

There’s been a systematic review published in this link (https://www.cces.ca/sites/default/files/content/docs/pdf/transgenderwomenathletesandelitesport-ascientificreview-e-final.pdf) by the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sports that calls into question the findings from reference 80.

On page 54 they claim the paper does not review current literature properly, contests their methodology and accuse them of committing errors and omitting data from its references in order to strengthen their argument.

The fact that their findings are being contested to this extent should be enough reason to not cite or use any information from that study. MarcoBarroca (talk) 05:24, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I see that there was already a previous discussion about removing this source. I think it’s prudent to take a look at it again now that that there is a publication contesting their work.

The publication in question is “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage” MarcoBarroca (talk) 05:41, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

That is not a systematic review that has been peer-reviewed in a proper WP:MEDRS journal; rather it was made by an activist group. The paper complains about almost all existing research on the topic, leading one to wonder just what evidence they would actually admit. It engages in false equivalence between biomedical science and fringe speculations about sex differences in even cisgender people as being sociocultural in origin, bizarrely discusses the gender identities of study authors, and revealingly concludes with "Sport organizers need better education, dedicated resources, and high-quality research to confront, disrupt or transform gendered systems." Crossroads ^-talk- 18:57, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Despite not being published in a peer reviewed medical journal the document was authored by researchers with experience in the field:

https://ealliance.ca/about-us/who-we-are

while they make complaints about pretty much every paper some of them are pretty benign and mostly irrelevant.

This paper though is the one to receive most of the criticism and they are quite clear on the accusations that they either omit or distort data from their own cited references. These claims are also very easy to verify by cross checking the information.

I want to add that the original reference states that there are no conflicts of interest and does not mention that the author Emma Hilton is not only part of a lobbying group against trans rights https://sex-matters.org/ but is listed as a co-founder.

Their website explicitly states that she officially joined the group in January 2021. A month after the publication was first released online.

She is also vocal on her social media about the topic. If activism is an issue then that affects both sides.

I’d argue that the concerns raised by this publication are enough to at the very least warrant a stricter check into the original work before citing it. 2804:D41:A803:C300:3853:8414:9F52:83A2 (talk) 15:58, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Hilton is just one author. And we generally treat reliability as conferred by peer review and publishing in an academic journal. Any possible problems with a paper are their responsibility to handle; if they have not retracted or forced revisions then that's that. The paper does not argue to ban trans women from women's sports but instead that each individual sport federation decide how to "balance between inclusion, safety and fairness". Authors of sources that argue in favor of trans women in female sports also often have their history of advocacy for their side. In itself, this is not disqualifying. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:32, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I want to resuscitate this conversation. It has come to my attention a letter to the editor was published on September 2023 regarding this source and it makes significant and relevant criticisms:

“The evidence offered by Hilton and Lundberg [3] is in the form of a narrative review and not a systematic review, albeit the search criteria are provided in the supplemental material for Sect. 4, “is the male performance advantage lost when testosterone is suppressed in transgender women?””

“ Given that there are currently very few transgender athletes competing in elite sports, and therefore even fewer related studies, the systematic review and meta-analysis strategy is at present impractical. Randomised control trials, the next highest-quality study design (Fig. 1), are also impractical in this area at present, leaving observational research, such as cohort studies [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30], cross-sectional studies [28, 29, 31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38], case–control studies, case reports and case series, as the higher-ranking evidence base that could be considered by international federations (Fig. 1).”

If this source is to remain I want to suggest we also cite information from the letter to the editor.

The reference number as of today is [75]. MarcoBarroca (talk) 19:16, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Forgot to link the letter. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-023-01928-8 MarcoBarroca (talk) 19:21, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 3 August 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki_Hiltz deserves be mentioned. Web-julio (talk) 23:19, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

 Question: Where should they be mentioned? Jamedeus (talk) 01:00, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Olympics, as competing this year, along with Hergie Bacyadan as well. Web-julio (talk) 01:58, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Please link to the article's section that you think is appropriate and suggest a sentence that should be added (with an appropriate reliable source if necessary). M.Bitton (talk) 19:57, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

like this? You can add "In 2024 Summer Olympics, Quinn, Hergie Bacyadan, and Nikki Hiltz were the only three transgender athletes competing." [1] [2] [3] [4] Web-julio (talk) 02:49, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. M.Bitton (talk) 00:06, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Is it right to call this a transgender issue, when it is a issue that has affects on everybody in society

Should this be classified as solely a trans rights issue, when it has affects on all of society, surely it is also a issue that affects everybody, surely the categorisation of it as a issue just affects transgender people, is restrictive. When folk such as Martina Navratilova, and Sharron Davies, and the Australian swimmer, Campbell, and Riley Gaines, have voiced concerns on this issue, into how it affects women's rights, surely we should appreciate the issue is a broad issue. Not just affecting the rights of the transgender community, and individuals, am I right. Please inform me, I like to be educated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C4:B3AD:8E01:19EF:DDD3:9FEE:C2F0 (talk) 19:42, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Do you have a specific suggestion to make on changes for the article?

Please note that this page is not a forum, so general discussions beyond specific improvements about the article, supported by reliable sources are out of scope of this talk page. Raladic (talk) 20:06, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

No, that is all I wanted to say, I am just saying categorising it as a Transgender issue, when it is a issue that affects everybody seems to be in my view rather restrictive, I wont add any more, as you Wikipedia is brilliant, so sorry. 2A00:23C4:B3AD:8E01:19EF:DDD3:9FEE:C2F0 (talk) 20:49, 6 August 2024 (UTC)