The science is still evolving when it comes to whether transgender women have an unfair advantage when they compete in the women’s category of sports.
The issue is complex: Individual sports rely on different physical and physiological attributes, and athletes undergo their gender transition at different times, in different ways.
What we do know is that separate sports categories for women were created because adult men are, in general, faster and stronger than women. Those two categories gave women not only an equal chance to participate in sports, but also a fair chance to win.
Puberty catapults boys far ahead of girls in raw physical terms. Boys experience a surge of production of testosterone, a hormone that boosts strength, muscle mass and endurance.
At the center of the current debate is whether trans women retain any of that advantage once they start taking drugs to suppress their natural testosterone and begin feminizing therapy, which includes taking estrogen. Scientific studies and opinions are conflicting.
One study showed that after two years of testosterone blockers, trans women were still faster than their peers who were assigned female at birth, but that there was no difference in the number of push-ups and sit-ups they could do.
Other scientists said hormone suppression “probably cannot negate” the effects of testosterone in sports that rely heavily on physiological capacity, like wrestling and track and field. Those experts concluded that trans women’s participation in that category of sports most likely did not allow sufficiently fair and safe competition.
Children who take hormone blockers to stop male puberty might still have an existing athletic edge, according to The European Journal of Sport Science. Its study found that boys 8 and under and those ages 9 to 10 ran faster, on average, than their female counterparts did in races 1,500-meters and shorter.
Another expert, one in transgender medicine and surgery, said there “does not seem to be any reason to expect advantage for transgender people prior to puberty of or for transgender people whose gender-affirming treatment begins at the onset of puberty.” But many experts agree that the topic needs to be studied much more.
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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