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?
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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.
Several people argue that if the metrics of a trans-identified male fall "within female range", it is fair for that male to compete in female sport.
But we need to look at what's typical .v. what's exceptional.
Male traits often overlap with female traits. Height, muscle mass and so forth all generate normal distributions within sex (bell curves), where the lower end of the male range overlaps with the upper end of the female range.