New IOC Study Refutes Conservative Assumptions About Trans Athletes

It should put the argument to rest, but we all know it will not.

A new groundbreaking study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee has proven that transgender athletes do not hold a competitive advantage over their cisgender counterparts and may, in fact, hold a significant disadvantage.

Few anti-transgender policies have taken off as quickly as the banning of transgender athletes, and after transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won a national swimming championship in her senior year, Republican legislatures across the nation rushed to ban transgender athletes, and specifically transgender women and girls from competing in sports at every level, citing “protection” for women’s sports (not that they ever cared in the past, however).

The political argument seemed simple; natural, even: We all know men are superior athletes to women, conservatives argued, so allowing trans women to compete with women would be inherently unfair. Because it felt like common sense to a lot of people, it made for a compelling political argument. Men, they absurdly argued, were transitioning to women so they could compete in women’s sports since they could not compete in traditionally male sports.

But the study that the IOC commissioned, and the University of Brighton conducted, found that while trans women are stronger in some respects, like grip strength, cis women have stronger lower bodies. The study also found that trans women have a similar bone density as their cis women counterparts, which rebuts a frequent refrain from conservatives who’ve argued otherwise to justify banning trans girls and women from sports.

This cross-sectional study, released in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at 35 transgender athletes and 21 cisgender athletes. Twelve of the 35 were transgender male and 23 were transgender female, all of whom had undergone hormone replacement therapy for at least one year.

The study refutes the Conservative argument that trans women’s bodies and cisgender male bodies are the same, and finds that hormone replacement therapy causes significant changes in trans women’s bodies, including a loss of bone density found in cisgender women. While it is only one study, the results prove that Conservative assumptions about transgender people are not based in science and are entirely based on political ideology.

We need more study on this issue, but at the very least, this should be a warning to  legislators and sports administrators who want to make decisions based on data not to rush to appease transphobic people who’ve been fomenting a panic over this issue. This report vindicates trans athletes, writers and advocates who’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to explain to general audiences that trans bodies differ greatly from cisgender bodies.

Then again, the trans athlete debate has never really been about fairness or safety in women’s sports. It’s always been about putting laws on the books that legally define trans women as men as a precedent for passing more anti-trans laws unrelated to sports. So this research will likely not make a difference in red state legislatures.

So chalk one up for science as the debate rages on.