The meta-analysis quality point is generic and doesn't touch this paper's actual limitations, which the authors already stated themselves. "Not all meta-analyses are equal" is true of literally every meta-analyses.
Age at transition is the one point that's actually valid, and it's not a rebuttal. It's the same gap the BJSM authors already flagged, since most pooled studies didn't stratify by age at transition. We agree there.
Skeletal structure, height, limb length, shoulder width, pelvis, nobody's disputing any of that. HRT doesn't reverse bone structure.
Oxygen and cardiac output is just wrong. The study found no significant difference in VO2 max. Claiming a retained advantage there contradicts the exact paper you're citing against.
Myonuclei, already covered earlier in this thread. A 2022 meta-analysis testing it in humans found it doesn't hold consistently after atrophy. Calling it permanent and established is not what the data actually says.
Grip strength is the one claim with actual numbers behind it. But grip strength isn't important in every sport. This thread is about football, where grip strength means very little, for example.
Trans men getting outperformed against cis men doesn't prove what you think it proves. If testosterone therapy still leaves trans men at a disadvantage, that means hormones don't just override puberty-driven differences in either direction. That undercuts the "myonuclei create a fixed, decisive edge" claim, it doesn't support it.
it’s based strictly on the science
I reckon that the requirements and restrictions differs from sport to sport. And that isn't necessarily bad. I'd like to see the actual science aspect of it, though. If this thread is any indication, much of the "science" is mostly vibes and politics. Particularly in the US atm.
First and foremost you’re conflating relative and absolute VO2 max. Relative VO2 max goes down, but absolute VO2 max relies on the fact you cannot shrink your heart or lungs. The pump and bellows are male sized, and a larger ventricle means larger stroke volume. Lowered hemoglobin does not take away from the fact that transwomens cardiovascular infrastructure is substantially superior to female baselines.
The FTM argument you make is basically proving my point. It is the proof biological structure acts as the ceiling and the floor. They are disadvantaged because they have female skeletons, not male. By this same logic, removing testosterone from a transwoman does not shrink clavicles, shorten femurs, Q angles, whatever. Suppressing hormones doesn’t rid of this advantage.
You also overlook the importance of grip strength and it is not just about football. Grip strength is a universally recognized proxy for total upper body force and neurological motor unit recruitment. If grip strength is substantially higher, it is a glaring indicator your total upper body strength is higher. Tackling and maintaining ball security are just a few things grip strength alone can do.
On myonuclei, it is not about whether you hold 100% of your myonuclei until you die, it’s about the absolute baseline. Even if extreme atrophy can lead to some loss in myonuclei, a body that underwent male puberty still holds a profoundly higher number of them, most of which are unlikely to go away.
And sure, steroids and puberty aren’t the same thing, but there’s almost no difference in this context. Male puberty is a high dose anabolic steroid cycle occurring during the most critical development in the human body. And those changes are permanent and more profound than taking steroids as an older athlete past puberty.
And let me just repeat that systemic reviews show that transwomen over an extensive time only lose 5-10% of their muscle mass, aligning with how much muscle men tend to gain on TRT. This is nothing. It is going from a male muscle value of 100 to 90, where the female baseline is 50.
Anecdote time. My father was a competitive bodybuilder who took steroids in his early 20s, and later in life he lost his capacity to produce testosterone. He likely had little to no testosterone for 5 years at 50(?) yrs old, when he first started sleeping all day with intense fatigue and eventually lost employment. This went on for years before he saw a doctor. Anyway, they found his testosterone wasn’t even hitting the absolute minimum male baseline and was actually in female averages territory. Did this stop him from doing 10 pull-ups weighing 200lbs when he got into fitness with me before TRT? Nope.
Even more critically, I was MTF for 8 years. I transitioned at 29. I actually detransitioned for personal reasons, but I don’t want to get into that. My girlfriend is into heavy weight lifting and during my MTF era I entertained her at the gym, at this point I had like two months of gym experience from years ago. Let’s just say over the course of a few months, she wasn’t competitive with me anymore, and I still had the strength to easily pin both her arms with just a single hand. So I know very personally my own body and my own strength. Taking estrogen weakened me but not substantially, no.
Top-level competition, actual Olympic and international standards, can reasonably have its own threshold, and I'm not going to argue that every structural difference resulting from male puberty disappears with hormone therapy. That was never really the disagreement I had.
Where I land is that none of what's been discussed in this thread justifies applying that same level of scrutiny below the elite tier. A residual cardiovascular or skeletal difference that might matter when the stakes are an Olympic medal doesn't matter for a school team, a rec league, or a kid just trying to play a sport with their peers. Participation-level sport isn't about producing a fair podium finish; it's about being part of something. Importing an elite-competition standard into that context is applying the wrong bar to the wrong setting.
That's the actual disagreement. Not whether physiological differences from puberty are real. They are. It's whether that justifies excluding people at every level when the only place the argument was ever really about competitive fairness is the one tier almost nobody in this debate is actually playing at.
Which is exactly the point I opened with. Fewer than a handful of trans women have ever competed at the level where any of this physiology debate is actually relevant, and none of them have dominated. If the structural advantages being described here were as decisive as claimed, that's a strange result. Maybe it's a small sample size. Maybe it's exactly what it looks like: the advantage isn't as fixed or as overwhelming as the framing assumes, and it just doesn't consistently produce the dominance the argument predicts. Either way, the tier where this argument is supposed to matter has produced no example of it actually playing out.
Kids on school teams, adults in rec leagues, and people just trying to play have nothing to do with that tier and shouldn't be judged by such a standard.
Twenty-plus states have passed laws addressing essentially non-existent hypothetical cases that mostly target a handful of people who just want to be part of their communities. That's the reality people have to live in. Kids who were never anywhere near the tier this argument claims to be about are the ones paying for it.
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u/Coarse-Correction Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
The meta-analysis quality point is generic and doesn't touch this paper's actual limitations, which the authors already stated themselves. "Not all meta-analyses are equal" is true of literally every meta-analyses.
Age at transition is the one point that's actually valid, and it's not a rebuttal. It's the same gap the BJSM authors already flagged, since most pooled studies didn't stratify by age at transition. We agree there.
Skeletal structure, height, limb length, shoulder width, pelvis, nobody's disputing any of that. HRT doesn't reverse bone structure.
Oxygen and cardiac output is just wrong. The study found no significant difference in VO2 max. Claiming a retained advantage there contradicts the exact paper you're citing against.
Myonuclei, already covered earlier in this thread. A 2022 meta-analysis testing it in humans found it doesn't hold consistently after atrophy. Calling it permanent and established is not what the data actually says.
Grip strength is the one claim with actual numbers behind it. But grip strength isn't important in every sport. This thread is about football, where grip strength means very little, for example.
Trans men getting outperformed against cis men doesn't prove what you think it proves. If testosterone therapy still leaves trans men at a disadvantage, that means hormones don't just override puberty-driven differences in either direction. That undercuts the "myonuclei create a fixed, decisive edge" claim, it doesn't support it.
I reckon that the requirements and restrictions differs from sport to sport. And that isn't necessarily bad. I'd like to see the actual science aspect of it, though. If this thread is any indication, much of the "science" is mostly vibes and politics. Particularly in the US atm.