Trans Athletes Have No Advantage Over Women, Claims BMJ Study

Male trans athletes have no advantage over women, a British Medical Journal study has claimed, prompting experts to say the many flaws in the study make it “almost worthless”. The Telegraph has more.

The researchers argued there was no evidence “to justify blanket bans” on trans women taking part in women’s sport.

The team looked at the strength, fitness and body composition of transgender people taking cross-sex hormones compared to women and men not taking drugs.

Authors of the study, which was published in BMJ Group-owned British Journal of Sports Medicine, said its findings challenged “assumptions” that trans women had an inherent advantage in sport.

The 2024 games in Paris were engulfed by controversy when Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the women’s welterweight boxing gold medal despite being disqualified from the 2023 World Championships for reportedly failing a gender eligibility test.

The new research has attempted to cast doubt on whether an apparent sporting advantage stacks up.

The report has prompted criticism from academics and sex-based rights campaigners for flaws in how it was conducted.

The authors from the University of Sao Paulo Brazil have also admitted that there are gaps in the “imperfect evidence” that they used to come to these conclusions.

Multiple sporting bodies in the UK banned trans women from taking part in women’s sport last year after the Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman under the Equality Act is based on biological sex.

This included football and cricket, while other sports such as cycling and triathlon had already introduced an open category for trans athletes.

The International Olympic Committee is looking at a trans ban, which was a pledge made by Kirsty Coventry, its President, in her election campaign.

The scientists analysed 52 studies on 6,485 people, the majority of whom were transgender.

They found that trans ‘women’ had more lean mass, a proxy for muscle, but no observable differences from women in body strength or maximal oxygen consumption – a key measure of cardiorespiratory fitness.

These metrics were also much lower than other men because of cross-sex hormones, which block testosterone production, the research said.

The authors admitted the evidence was of mixed quality and lacked a range of ages, sports and competitive levels.

However, they said it did not back up the “prevailing theories” of an inherent advantage or “justify blanket bans” in sport.

“Ideally, to resolve speculation, future longitudinal studies should prioritise performance-specific metrics in transgender athletes,” they said.

“However, one should be aware of the scarce number of transgender athletes, particularly in the elite sport.”

Commenting on the study, Alun Williams, a Professor of Sport and Exercise Genomics at Manchester Metropolitan University, said the research “suffers from several problems”, including that fitness levels were not tracked over time and before treatment began.

He said the strength tests relied on “voluntary effort” and so should be “treated sceptically”, especially as the trans women had more muscle mass, while it was “almost worthless to compare groups without tight assessment of training history”.

He argued it could be that, as a group, they “were not as strong or as aerobically fit” as other men before transitioning, and pointed out that trans ‘women’ still had physical advantages such as height and limb length, compared to females.

Prof Williams added that he and other experts had “reviewed the same literature” and found the loss of sports performance among trans ‘women’ on hormones was “notably smaller than typical differences between men and women”.

Worth reading in full.