AnotherAttorney

I think you’re right the most of the argument for the ban relates to fairness, and I frankly doubt that there have been any sort of safety studies done in cricket that would speak to my point.

[1] Because while strength decreases, empirical research shows that it does not decrease to the level of removing the competitive advantage in women’s sports.

[2] This article contains utterly no discussion about transgender athletes that have already undergone male puberty.

[3] You’re relying on ad hominem attacks instead of actually addressing any of the substantive findings. Moreover, your articles do not contain a single empirical study.

[4] If you read the full article, you would see that it doesn’t decline to the point of removing the advantage, as my quoted sections show. In fact, the very next sentence after the one you quote reads “However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events.” Your claim of cherry picking is ironic.

[5] Yes, the meaning of a case study is that it studies a single case. Notably, there are only five known transgender swimmers in the NCAA’s Division I, which was the subject of the study. I’m not sure what you’re trying to do by citing another study (ultimately finding that transwomen “were still stronger and had more muscle mass following 12 months of treatment”) in support of my point, but go off I guess.

[6] Your “systematic review” is close to a decade old and, unsurprisingly, doesn’t address any of the studies I cited. Moreover, the study you’re citing consistently admits that it doesn’t have enough information to really make any judgments - and its conclusion is based on the importance of sports for the physical and mental health of transgender people. To the extent it discusses competitive advantage, it does so entirely within the context of androgenic hormones, and contains no discusses of anatomical differences (e.g., larger bodies, longer legs, bigger bones, larger lungs). In addition to citing an outdated study in a rapidly evolving field of research, you then you cite a Daily Beast article – lmfao.

I think you’re conflating the severity of being hit with a thrown ball with the frequency of being hit with it. I agree that getting smacked with a rock going 80 mph vs. 60 mph both carry a significant risk of harm, even in protective gear. My point is that women are more likely to be unable to effectively respond to those faster pitches, particularly towards the end of a match, and thus are exposed to a greater frequency of being hit by the ball and injured.

If you have ever been in a batting cage, you should understand how much more difficult it becomes to read a ball with even a 5-10 mph increase in speed. Not only do biological women lack the same muscle and skeletal composition that allows men to respond quickly in dodging or turning into a misguided pitch, but they also exhaust quicker and thus are more likely to be suffer from a delayed neurological response in doing the initial mental read of the ball’s path. If you suddenly turn the speed of those pitches up by a third, you’re increasing the likelihood that those women batters will be hit, regardless of whether the injury is likely to be the same.

My bad, I actually wasn’t aware of that. That’s fucking ridiculous.

you’re not actually discussing that claims by saying they’re likely to be exhausted.

Just so I’m understanding this right, you’re saying that exhaustion doesn’t affect safety? I think it absolutely does.

in the men’s league that risk is obviously not something that prevents the game from being played.

Because they don’t exhaust as easily.

Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn’t necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.

Agreed. That said, I’ve yet to see a major sport league that bans transgenders in women’s divisions without at least some empirical research existing that demonstrates an unfair advantage.

Because scientific males have significant anatomical differences than scientific females, which results in the former having dramatically increased strength and endurance. It doesn’t take that much explanation to understand why it might be bad to have an athlete hurling what are essentially rocks at 80+ mph towards batters who are lacking sufficient muscle fibers to respond effectively and, especially towards the end of a match, are far more likely to be exhausted.

By this logic, we should all go back to open division sports, which is what historically led to a de facto exclusion of women from all sports because, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them were unable to be competitive in divisions that had men in them.

Cricket balls are hard dude. Like really hard.

Sorry dude, but you’re objectively wrong. There is a wealth of academic studies demonstrating that transgender players have an advantage in women’s divisions, and that gender-affirming treatment fails to rectify that.

Testosterone drives much of the enhanced athletic performance of males through in utero, early life, and adult exposure. Many anatomical sex differences driven by testosterone are not reversible. Hemoglobin levels and muscle mass are sensitive to adult life testosterone levels, with hemoglobin being the most responsive. Studies in transgender women, and androgen-deprivation treated cancer patients, show muscle mass is retained for many months, even years, and that co-comittant exercise mitigates muscle loss. Given that sports are currently segregated into male and female divisions because of superior male athletic performance, and that estrogen therapy will not reverse most athletic performance parameters, it follows that transgender women will enter the female division with an inherent advantage because of their prior male physiology.

Heather AK. Transwoman Elite Athletes: Their Extra Percentage Relative to Female Physiology. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jul 26;19(15):9103. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19159103. PMID: 35897465; PMCID: PMC9331831.

Transwomen retain an advantage in upper body strength (push-ups) over female controls for 1–2 years after starting gender affirming hormones. Transwomen retain an advantage in endurance (1.5 mile run) over female controls for over 2 years after starting gender affirming hormones.

Roberts TA, Smalley J, Ahrendt DEffect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: implications for sporting organisations and legislatorsBritish Journal of Sports Medicine 2021;55:577-583.

[T]he transgender woman swimmer experienced improvements in performance for each freestyle event (100 to 1,650 yards) relative to sex-specific NCAA rankings, including producing the best swimming time in the NCAA for the 500-yard distance (65th in the men’s category in 2018–2019 to 1st in the women’s, 2022). Similarly, NCAA-ranked male swimmers had no improvements in rank in the men’s category during the same time frame. Our findings suggest that the performance times of the transgender woman swimmer in the women’s NCAA category were outliers for each event distance and suggest that the transgender woman swimmer had superior performances relative to rank-matched swimmers.

Case Studies in Physiology: Male to female transgender swimmer in college athletics Jonathon W. Senefeld, Sandra K. Hunter, Doriane Coleman, and Michael J. Joyner Journal of Applied Physiology 2023 134:4, 1032-1037

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