Lots of clever people noticing the basic flaw with the current argument being presented to @WorldRugby.
If even ‘starved’ untrained transwomen retain 20-40% muscle/strength than matched females, how can one argue that trained transwomen will reach parity?
The premise of ‘nobody has studied changes in athletes’ implies that athletes:
1. will respond differently to the general population to T suppression. 2. will somehow become more similar to females than the untrained population, who retain a 20-40% over matched females.
The proposed biological mechanisms etc to support these implications are never clarified.
1. There is very solid rationale to believe that transwomen athletes will respond differently to the general population to T suppression.
That is: pre-trained transwomen are unlikely to follow the ‘starved model’ baseline, and newly-training transwomen are likely to mitigate muscle/strength loss, perhaps even gain.
Which deals with implication 2.
I want to hear biological arguments for the hypothesis that athletic transwomen will become more on par with females than will gym-shy, aggressively atrophying transwomen.
Does anyone have any? Seen any?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Birds use genetic sex determination, just like humans.
The "make male" gene for humans is called SRY, and it lives on the Y chromosome.
If you have functional SRY and its downstream transcriptional storm, you will make testes and make male.
Birds differ. Their "make male" gene is called DMRT1.
It pretty much works like SRY, in that it's immediate downstream target is the parallel gene in both humans and parrots, and the ensuing transcriptional storm triggers testes development (testes being male, of course).
"This model of estradiol’s role in improving resistance to wound sepsis predicts at least four “sexes” across two treatment groups: females who are in the proestrus phase, females who are in the diestrus phase, females who are postmenopausal, and males."
This is Sarah Richardson, of the Fuentes review.
Four "sexes", three of them female and the other male. JFC.
Apparently-female athletes who test positive for SRY will have a consultation with WA, with a view to medical assessment to better understand any medical conditions (DSDs) they have.
It is this diagnosis that will determine eligibility (or not).
After a primer on sex development, Sinclair tries a gotcha.
Describing Swyer Syndrome and CAIS, he argues these athletes would be unfairly excluded.
But WA makes it clear that CAIS is exempt from exclusion. It’s in both the policy and the press release. I doubt Swyer would be excluded either.
Five years ago, I gave a speech comparing sex denialism to creationism.
At the time, my partner-in-crime, Colin Wright, and I were near-lone academic voices willing to stand up and say “Biology! We have a problem!”
@SwipeWright
Reflecting, back in 2020, on that state of affairs:
“[That] there are two sexes, male and female is apparently something that biologists do not think needs to be said.
I think they are wrong.”
Since then, biologists with far more authority than an unknown developmental biologist who was trying to work out how nerves navigate over muscles and an unknown evolutionary biologist who was studying what makes insects mad have spoken up.