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World sports has been convulsed over the past few months—indeed years—by questions about trans athletes, especially trans women, competing in their acquired gender.
Most recently, World Athletics announced its “preferred option” of a reduced 2.5nmol testosterone limit for trans women to compete, with a final decision due on March 23.
Other sporting bodies have proposed stricter eligibility rules, including Rugby Football Union, the Rugby Football League, British Triathlon and British Athletics, based on excluding male advantage gained through puberty or “androgenization” (the process leading to irreversible musculoskeletal and cardiovascular changes at puberty) from female competition.
Like British Athletics, British Triathlon said it wanted an “open” category for “all individuals including male, [male and female] transgender and those non-binary who were male sex at birth,” while World Aquatics will make trans women athletes ineligible from competing in elite women’s swimming and diving, saying “fairness was non-negotiable.”
Tensions are still very apparent, but there are some signs, with these new policies, of a shift on global policy from one based on testosterone levels to one based on male advantage acquired at puberty. And it is clear that the terrain has been shifting from the terrain of science to the terrain of ethics.
One new development has been a sort of quietening on the scientific front. Although you still get the odd piece trying to make the claim that testosterone suppression can remove male advantage, most of the serious people in the debate have given up on this claim. A systematic review of studies showed that, even if hormone therapy reduces levels to those seen in women, strength, lean body mass and muscle area remained higher for at least three years. And we always knew that the skeletal advantages remained.