• Nat (she/they)
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    1 day ago

    If you read past those numbers, you see that a followup study following participants for 4 years saw:

    Using these approaches, the researchers showed that trans women performance on the 1.5 mile run was not statistically different from cis women times following two years of gender affirming hormone therapy and remained equivalent to cis women out to year four (874 ± 133 s vs. 876 ± 111 s.)

    Also keep in mind that this is selecting for people already in athletics, so there’s a selection bias there. Potentially only the better trans women remain in sports, skewing the results (not saying that is the case, but that it’s hard to say for certain what the data means). Also also the sample size is 46 trans women, which shrinks in the followup study as participants dropped out over time, so that’s a pretty small sample size to base any serious claims on.

    Reading on even further, another cited study showed trans women performing worse the cis women. Ultimately, I think these numbers are not useful for you and I because the uncertainty is too large.

    The meta study you cite even has a section (5) explaining that this is not a great reason to ban trans people:

    However, if these average differences lead to inequity or injury, restricting trans individuals from these sports and athletics may not be the best solution. […] However, when looking at a sample distribution of players, >300 males sampled fall below the 2nd percentile of average male body mass and >300 females sampled are above the 98th percentile of average female body mass. If being too large or too small were a critical concern for rugby injuries, more injuries may be prevented by restricting those >600 players who fell far outside the average player mass than banning trans athletes.

    All this also ignores that if it were a real problem, surely trans people would be dominating sports, yet they’re not. Trans people have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for a while, and I can’t name a single trans medalist.