Study finds no clear advantage for trans women over cisgender women in sports

akramachamarei

Despite title, this study did not investigate the question of sports advantage, at least not directly. It looked at physical fitness, concluding: > While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender. I don't find this study especially interesting or pertinent on the subject of sports advantage, as it only covers a small number of possible Whys, but doesn't touch Whats. It would be more useful for researchers to compare actual sports performance. For obvious reasons, these studies are probably not available for metaanalysis.

icegreentea2

Didn't find the full study, but what I'm pretty sure is a preprint is here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.25326994v... One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive. The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect). The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW. I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.

catheter

Excited to hear some very normal and nuanced opinions on this.

corsendonk

There are four lights.

dodu_

The entire discourse about "trans in sports" has always been and will always be manufactured panic that is motivated by bigotry. If one truly cared about (un)fairness in sports there are other issues that you'd address long before you ever even think of trans. So the only actual conclusion one can make is that that the people complaining about this don't actually care about fairness. Instead, this "issue" only exists to serve as a vector to express bigotry in what they feel is a more socially acceptable way, mostly because they're too cowardly to actually own their bigotry. The easiest test for this: If you were presented with a way to include transgender people in sports in a perfectly fair manner, would you be in favor of it?

leevilux

Given that there are so few trans athletes and assuming there is no advantage over women, it is very surprising that we have seen so many trans gold medalists.

mike_prixe

what about MMA/Boxing?

conartist6

Perhaps the time is right for a new wave of interest in ultimate frisbee? I was a bar the other day and there was an actual ultimate frisbee tournament game on TV with a commentator and everything. There they were, men and women playing a team sport side by side on the same field, and there was me watching with a beer! It was good game too with some banger hucks and bids

timnetworks

A study would presumably also find no clear advantage in a fistfight between a husband and wife? Protecting half the population is countably higher stakes.

sapphicsnail

The amount of people who wade into this fight without knowing a single thing about HRT baffles me.