A new study claims that men on hormone therapy displayed obvious physical advantages over female rivals. NBC News reported on the study with implications for transgender threats to women's sports, and the story also includes emotional justification for allowing males to shove their weight advantages around in women’s sports.
NBC News reporter Dan Avery cited the results of the study “Effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: implications for sporting organisations and legislators”, published last month in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Dr. Timothy Roberts, Joshua Smalley and Dale Arendt asserted that the current year-long waiting period for male Olympic athletes seeking to compete in female sports is “inadequate.”
Dr. Roberts, the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, is the study’s lead author. He and the other researchers studied medical records and fitness tests for 29 transgender men and 46 transgender women in the military from 2013 to 2018, and they concluded that, “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women.”
In the first year, these men out-did females in pushups and sit-ups, but their performances grew more even after two years. Let’s see the scientists and the athletic bureaucrats try reasoning with real women about accepting two or more years of imbalanced, unfair playing fields. Let them have a look at the above photo of the big, burley Hannah Mouncey, a man crushing a female opponent in Australian women’s handball!
These findings at first seem to be a slap-down for the Left-stream media, which almost universally tout transgenderism in sports. SBNation Outsports, in particular, is on a crusade trying to prove that trans men are “women” and the science refutes male advantages over female athletes.
Avery went right to the author of a 2015 study by Joanne Harper claiming hormones slow down men’s athletic performance. Harper said she sees some limitations in the Roberts study, and she questioned “the lack of data on participants’ individual training habits” because there was “no coordination between when subjects started hormones and when they took their annual fitness test.”
Harper tried to excuse away the transitioning males’ advantage in speed as due to suspected, but unfounded, greater training intensity. Not due to bigger muscle mass? Nonetheless, she had to admit that pushup and sit-up tests “involve muscular strength, technique, muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance: and “are probably good proxies for success in many team sports.” Ya think?
Another cop-out by Harper is that, “It’s not necessary for all advantages to be removed. All that is necessary is for trans women to perform more like cisgender women than like cisgender men.” This is an example of “science” reduced to emotional rubbish.
With science not on the side of the trans movement, Avery played the discrimination card. Yes, lesbian tennis great Billie Jean King had stated "There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind,” and transgender athletes just want the opportunity to compete in the sport they love. Get that weak argument out of here, BJ, because if access is all that matters, these guys can compete on the men’s teams where they belong.
Avery also mentions that U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., is sponsoring the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which would prohibit federal funding from any schools that allow males to take over female sports. Roberts is not backing the legislation and is instead choosing political correctness by gutlessly backtracking on his own research. He now says it doesn’t apply to recreational and youth athletics.
The flipflopping continued with Roberts then admitting – according to Avery – that “there is no way to remove all of an athlete’s advantages — regardless of their gender identity.” So which is it? Roberts is all over the place.
Which takes us back to square one: men are stronger, faster and more athletic than women and should be confined to competing on male sports teams. Science and the eyeball test prove this.
