Lia Thomas And The Denial Of Biological Reality

 Jerry Coyne, whose Why Evolution Is True blog is linked on the sidebar, has a fine post from earlier in the month outlining the problems with Lia Thomas' swimming record:

While her performance on the men’s team was so-so, Thomas has become famous by cleaning up after joining the women’s team, breaking record after record and beating her opponents by substantial times. She may well break the records of famous women swimmers like Katie Ledecky and Missy Franklin.
…

It’s also clear from recent research (see here, for instance), that many of these advantages are acquired at puberty, and even hormone-blocking after puberty (testosterone suppression) won’t eliminate either physical or performance advantages of males, even after three years of treatment. (The International Olympic Committee used to require only one year of hormone suppression.) While Thomas has had several years of hormone suppression, she still shows the physical advantages acquired as a male who experienced puberty, and there’s little doubt that these advantages are making her a champion.

To deny the above is to deny reality. Thomas’s new record of victory largely reflects the physical and phsiological [sic] advantages over women she gained at puberty. While she identifies as a woman (and should be treated as such in nearly every area save sport), she is winning with the advantages gained as a male. This should be uncontroversial to anybody who knows the facts.

 I somehow missed that "[T]he Olympics has, for the moment, rescinded its rule on transgender athletes and has no rule in place at all", which I assume means the extremely lax rules published last November.

Much to my surprise, Outsports had a surprisingly open response to the Sports Illustrated interview with Thomas that also sparked Coyne's essay (one of at least two he's written on the subject). I say "surprisingly open" because Cyd Zeigler at least recognizes this is not strictly a left-vs-right culture war fiasco.  But her Outsports piece calls legislative efforts to ban transwomen in women's sports "unnecessary". When the sanctioning bodies refuse to understand the differences between men and women, people not under the sway of gender ideology will notice this and act accordingly. When the NCAA and IOC have fallen prey to trans activist bullying, it's time to stand up and be counted.

The New IOC Transgender Participation Rules Are Unfair To Biological Women

 The International Olympic Committee released its new framework for transgender and intersex athletes Tuesday. Hard as it is to believe, it is even worse than the old 2015 rules, which required testosterone level verification — despite the utter lack of science behind this. (The problem is the ineradicable changes wrought by male puberty: even after a year of hormone therapy, M2F transsexual athletes retained the vast majority of their strength advantage.)

The document itself is a pastiche of delusion, starting with its first section. Titled "Inclusion", all else follows from that idea, namely, that anyone who claims to be female should also get to compete with them in athletic events. The rest is filled with rationalizations for how this is to happen and why. Quoting Fair Play for Women's response (emboldening all mine):

UK sports governing bodies now have two different sets of guidance to consider, and on this point they agree. The new Sports Councils Equality Group guidance also concluded that testosterone suppression was pointless. But unlike the IOC, they kept sight of the implications: there is no fair way to include people who’ve been through male puberty in female competitive sport. Women will always be disadvantaged. That’s why a separate category for the female sex exists in most sports in the first place.

The IOC claims it has taken notice of the UK Sports Councils Equality Group’s output. It’s hard to see how. The IOC’s new guidance has abandoned the science and says there should be “no presumption of advantage”.

“No athlete should be excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”

What does this mean? It means that being transgender is no longer to be counted as having any relevance at all for sporting eligibility. No one is arguing that we don’t need separate female and male (or open) classes. Without them, females would barely get a look-in. Yet the IOC is saying being born male is not a factor.

“Transgender status” is what permits a male to compete as a female when there’s a massive advantage, ranging from 10% at the low end, in running and rowing, to 35% in weightlifting. This advantage is unaffected by gender identity. It would be laughable, were it not so disappointing, that the IOC has thrown out the fig-leaf of testosterone suppression and ended up with self-identification.

 The gasoline that will keep this car moving is the fact that there is necessarily a limited supply of M2F transsexuals wanting to participate in women's sports. That does not make this any more fair to biological women.

The IAAF Still Can't Spell "Male Puberty"

The International Amateur Athletics Federation has lately released a new version of their eligibility regulations for female classification (PDF, h/t Cathy Young). It is superior to the IOC's eligibility requirements in one respect only: it actually contains references to scientific papers. Particularly, the IAAF document rests on the fulcrum of an October, 2018 Endocrine Reviews paper, "Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences In Athletic Performance" by David J Handelsman, Angelica L Hirschberg, and Stephane Bermon. The concluding bullet point of their "Essential Points" section reads (emboldening mine):

Based on the nonoverlapping, bimodal distribution of circulating testosterone concentration (measured by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry) with 95% references ranges of 7.7 to 29.4 nmol/L in healthy men and 0 to 1.7 nmol/L in healthy premenopausal women—making an allowance for women with the mild hyperandrogenism of polycystic ovary syndrome, who are overrepresented in elite athletics—the eligibility criterion for female athletic events should be a circulating testosterone concentration of <5.0 nmol/L

This of course fails to explain the results from the Karolinska Institute, which showed M2F transsexuals still retained the majority of their muscle mass (PDF) even after testosterone suppression therapy.  Handelsman et al. at least have the good sense to mention male puberty:

The strongest justification for sex classification in elite sports is that after puberty men produce 20 times more testosterone than women (4–7), resulting in circulating testosterone concentrations 15-fold higher than in children or women of any age. Age-grade competitive sporting records show no sex differences prior to puberty, whereas from the age of male puberty onward there is a strong and ongoing male advantage (8). The striking male postpubertal increase in circulating testosterone provides a major, ongoing, cumulative, and durable physical advantage in sporting contests by creating larger and stronger bones, greater muscle mass and strength, and higher circulating hemoglobin as well as possible psychological (behavioral) differences. In concert, these render women, on average, unable to compete effectively against men in power-based or endurance-based sports.

They later have the guts to bust out with an obvious truth: "If sex classification were eliminated [in sporting events], such open or mixed competitions would be dominated almost exclusively by men." But in the end, this is so much lip service. They have no way of explaining the Karolinska results without also taking into account the advantages of undergoing male puberty. It is not enough to suppress testosterone.

Update: Reminder that the IOC knew or should have known that testosterone suppression was inadequate back in 2016 when they cooked up that document. Dr. Antonia Lee last year asked several people involved in the process to comment now that there have been a significant number of M2F transsexuals beating biological women in various athletic events. Particularly interesting is the section on professor Arne Ljungqvist (note, I have added hyperlinks to the footnote):

In 2005 and writing in the Lancet (5), Ljungqvist, in a basic review of the literature commented, “…after one year of therapy, male-to-female muscle mass remained greater than that observed in the comparison female-to-male group…”. In other words, he was previously aware of at least one retained physical advantage as shown in one study that had informed the IOC’s former (2004) and more demanding participation guidelines. In the same Lancet piece, Ljungqvist also says, “Ultimately, the number of transsexual athletes who can successfully compete in open international events is likely to be small, in accord with the estimated incidence of gender dysphoria of one in about every 12 000 men and one in about every 30 000 women”.

The IAAF document looks, in this light, increasingly a product of an engineered process designed to arrive at a conclusion already decided upon.

Time For Another Links Post

• The case of Katie Hill bothers me at multiple levels, not least because I largely think whatever people decide to do with their genitals in their private lives is their own affair. Yes, it was gross that her vengeful ex-husband leaked photos. Yes, it violated House ethics rules for her to sleep with an underling — but is that reasonable? Is the presumption now that all consensual sex between subordinates and supervisors is intrinsically unfair and coercive? I find myself agreeing, in part, with Jessica Valenti’s assessment of the situation (she was taken down by “revenge porn”), but this is the #MeToo world Valenti and her compatriots designed. Arguably, Hill created a #MeToo victim in the staffer, and those are the stakes here. For Valenti, women can only ever be victims, which says a great deal about her thought processes.
• Remember when Wired didn’t suck? It has to have been 20 years ago or more. The only reason I can think of for them to write this disingenuous, lazy piece, “Trans Athletes Are Posting Victories and Shaking Up Sports“ is to garner hate-clicks:

  Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.
  
  These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort. But as more transgender athletes rise to the top of their fields, some vocal opponents are also expressing outrage at what they see as transgender athletes ruining sports for cisgendered girls and women.

  “Training”, I suppose, which equals “going through male puberty and then simply declaring yourself to be female”. The question of motive inevitably arises, and while, yes, it’s easy to impute the urge for easy podium places and trophies as the primary draw of this cheating approach, it also is irrelevant. (CeCe Telfer particularly strikes me as mercenary enough to be in this class.) Biological males are stronger than women, on average and especially at the right side of the bell curve. This is not hard. Bending over backwards to cater to the delusional, narcissistic, and even sociopathic is absolute nonsense.
• Deadspin was at its best when pursuing stories other sports media wouldn’t touch. I seem to recall they were unafraid of the Joe Paterno fall to earth caused by his covering for Jerry Sandusky and the latter’s buggering of young boys, and they likewise went after Ray Rice (though that story broke on TMZ Sports). Now comes the news that editor Barry Petchesky has been fired amid a “stick to sports” edict from new owners G/O Media (the second rebranding since they were spun off the old Gawker Media in bankruptcy court). I have a hard time mustering much concern for him and those who quit in sympathy, mainly because a site that feels it meet to give airtime to a grown-ass woman rape-shaming her pre-sexual son has not only lost its way, it has gone insane.
• A free press is only interesting to people who work in it if they can get paid, apparently, so former Time editor Richard Stengel is penning stupid op-eds in the Washington Post claiming we need to gut the First Amendment, because, reasons.
• Emma Sulkowicz is now fun at parties because, libertarian, or something. Protip: apologize to Paul Nungesser, then I might believe some of this stuff is anything other than a stunt to get your name back in the news.
• First Circuit Court of Appeals to John Doe in Doe v. Boston College, scheduled for argument next week: sorry, Jeanne Suk Gearson, your attorney whom you have paid for many weeks if not months of preparation, may not defend you in court, because, reasons. This is the court putting its finger on the scales of justice, and if I were a betting man, I would put money that this is a politicized punishment.

Rachel McKinnon Wins Another Women’s Cycling World Title

M2F transsexual cyclist Rachel McKinnon is in the news again, having won a women’s sprint world championship, and earlier, setting a world record qualifying time in the 200m event. As usual, she is full of the same lame justifications as to why she should be allowed to participate in women’s cycling:

"All my medical records say female," she said. "My doctor treats me as a female person, my racing licence says female, but people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male.

"There's a stereotype that men are always stronger than women, so people think there is an unfair advantage. By preventing trans women from competing or requiring them to take medication, you're denying their human rights."

Luckily, the Sky News piece goes on to mention (without linking to) the Karolinska Institute study showing M2F transwomen retained the vast majority of their leg strength even after a year of hormone therapy. On Twitter, she was even more uninhibited, claiming

The thing is, the people who oppose trans women's full and equal rights think that the 'facts' are on their side.

This is why they always come back to "common sense."

That's not an argument, loves. It's the last refuge of the ignorant. It means you've already lost, bad.

— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) October 20, 2019

Pressed on the Karolinska study as to whether she retained an advantage, McKinnon weaseled her way out: "Is it possible? Yes it is possible. But there are elite track cyclists who are bigger than me.“ Needless to say, this is less than satisfying. The main reasons why transwomen’s stature within women’s sport is what it is come down to a number of causes:

1. The bullying of trans advocates to gain M2F transsexual entry to biological women’s sporting events. It is telling that the IOC’s position statement on transwomen participation contains not a single reference to any scientific papers.
2. The small sample sizes available even in the limited number of quality studies available in this space (c.f. the Karolinska Institute study linked above, n=11 for transwomen, and n=12 for transmen).
3. The minuscule number of M2F transsexuals actually participating in biological women’s sporting events.

McKinnon routinely elides the strong evidence that transwomen retain a huge advantage over biological women in athletic events, expressing the narcissism, feigned ignorance, and contempt that has been her hallmark ever since she started winning UCI races. I have to believe this is typical of the whole of trans activists. When do any of them express any kind of empathy for the fourth place biological woman denied her place at the podium?

Update: McKinnon has written off participating in the 2020 Olympics, and I can only wonder at the reasons. Is it because she can’t compete among the best (younger) women in the world? Or because she knows what a firestorm she would face if she won on that stage? Consider her differing photos from victories in 2018 versus 2019:

2018

2019

McKinnon literally towers over her second- and third-place competitors in 2018 (per this Velo News article, she is six feet tall), but has been apparently shot to minimize her height advantage in the 2019 photo. I have not been able to find Kirsten Herup’s height thus far, but assume six feet (183 cm) is unlikely.

M2F Transsexuals Retain Strength Advantage Even After One Year Of Hormone Therapy

Fair Play For Women brings us a new Swedish study showing that even after one year of hormone therapy,

[There was] no change in a transwoman’s thigh muscle strength after 12 months of hormone therapy. Still a full 50% higher than female thigh strength. Even still higher than the thigh strength of a transman after 12 months on high T.

The number of trans women was still small (n=11), but the study was performed with much more rigor than prior studies in this area. The Fair Play piece concludes:

The IOC must immediately suspend its eligibility guidelines saying that male-born trans athletes can play in female teams if they reduce their T to 10 nmol/L for 12 months. There is no credible science to support this position.

They must also stop tinkering around the edges having meaningless debates on whether to lower the rules on T from 10nmol/L to 5 nmol/L. It doesn’t matter how low you set the T levels. Male muscle strength stays the same even at <1nmol/L FACT.

Sports bodies where thigh muscle strength gives a clear advantage in competition must suspend their trans eligibility rules immediately. Like Cycling, Rugby, Weight lifting, Athletics etc. No more women must lose their place on the podium to males.

Australian Cricket Accepts Transwomen In The Women's Game, Gets An Earful

The usual inanity about "inclusion":

Today we take a major step to ensure inclusiveness is at the heart of Australian Cricket.

Learn more about the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in the game: https://t.co/XbewXwazH4#ASportForAll pic.twitter.com/cRlM2TKx21

— Cricket Australia (@CricketAus) August 7, 2019

Luckily, @FondOfBeetles is on it:

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Cricket Australia said:
‘It doesn’t make any sense that today, people are discriminated against, harassed or excluded, because of who they are.’

Of course we exclude people in sports. 1/

— Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) August 8, 2019

Full thread at threadreaderapp.

The Biological Girls Sue

Not that it is likely to find much of a friendly reception, but three Connecticut girls are filing suit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference. The complaint itself is a wonder, explaining in detail things that should not need explaining to any athletics body — but these days, the insane and the politically correct have overrun virtually every field. I wish the girls every bit of success, but fear they won’t get it.

CeCe Telfer The Latest M2F Transsexual To Whup College Women

Is there a dumber argument in favor of trans women competing against biological women than “doesn’t win every time”? Outsports seems determined to die on that hill, which is getting harder and harder for the heavily politicized trans lobby to justify to the broader public. Let’s Run has a good summary of the situation pre-transition:

Prior to joining the women’s team this season, Telfer was a mediocre DII athlete who never came close to making it to nationals in the men’s category. In 2016 and 2017, Telfer ranked 200th and 390th, respectively, among DII men in the 400 hurdles (Telfer didn’t run outdoor track in 2018 as either a man or woman). Now she’s the national champion in the event simply because she switched her gender (Telfer’s coach told us that even though she competed on the men’s team her first three years, her gender fluidity was present from her freshman year).

The fact that Telfer can change her gender and immediately become a national champion is proof positive as to why women’s sports needs protection. Telfer ran slightly faster in the 400 hurdles competing as a man (57.34) than as a woman (57.53), even though the men’s hurdles are six inches taller than the women’s hurdles. Yet when Telfer ran 57.34 as a man, she didn’t even score at her conference meet — she was just 10th at the Northeast-10 Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 2016. Now she’s the national champion.

The shabby, data-free arguments used to justify M2F trans inclusion in sports are unraveling before our eyes, in a sort of open-air experiment being performed before the whole public.

JayCee Cooper And Media Stenography, Deadspin Edition

More trash from Deadspin. Jesse Singal:

"When it came to physical attributes there was complete overlap between the men and women analyzed, McKinnon pointed out."

I meeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaan okay but. pic.twitter.com/rC25Goq20y

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 9, 2019

The Univariate Fallacy, Caster Semenya, and Testosterone

Colin Wright continues his excellent string of explainers, this time on the Univariate Fallacy:

1/ The modern far Left has a political agenda to destroy/deconstruct biological realities under the guise of Social Justice. A common way they go about this is by dishonestly applying univariate statistics to multivariate problems. This is called the Univariate Fallacy.

Thread. pic.twitter.com/xi1n4Xkn3s

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

2/ This fallacy, when deployed, is commonly done using a single sentence buried within an article or essay couched around a broader narrative on the history of a particular type of oppression, such as sexism. Let me give you some recent examples of this fallacy in action.

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

He goes on to talk about several different pieces deploying this fallacy — which he later describes as

Realized I never really provided a simple definition of the Univariate Fallacy. Oops, sorry!

But basically it is this:

The claim that if there is no single, defining trait that can be used to separate two or more categories, then those categories do not exist.

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

One of his examples is a New York Times editorial claiming that "The Myth of Testosterone" is what fuels Caster Semenya's run (and the athletic superiority of men over women more generally):

Testosterone’s “authorized” biography, with its pat story about how it fuels male-typical athletic performance, is a powerful distraction from the hormone itself, occluding its fascinating, diverse and contingent actions within the body. Testosterone doesn’t drive a single path to athletic performance, nor even a small set of processes that can be linearly traced from more testosterone to more ability.

The idea that testosterone is the miracle molecule of athleticism, and, accordingly, that people with higher levels would obviously perform better, combines several beliefs: that “athleticism” is a kind of master trait that describes similar characteristics in different athletes, that “athletic performance” across different sports generally requires the same core skills or capacities, and that testosterone has a potent effect on all of them.

But that’s simply not true. The problem with trying to flatten athleticism into a single dimension is illustrated especially well by a 2004 study published in The Journal of Sports Sciences. The study analyzed testosterone and different types of strength among men who were elite amateur weight lifters and cyclists or physically fit non-athletes. Weight lifters had higher testosterone than cyclists and showed more explosive strength. But the cyclists, who had lower testosterone than both other groups, scored much higher than the others on “maximal workload,” an endurance type of strength. Across the three groups, there was no relationship between testosterone and explosive strength, and a negative relationship between testosterone and maximal workload. Though small, that study isn’t an outlier: Similar complex patterns of mixed, positive and negative relationships with testosterone are found throughout the literature, involving a wide range of sports.

In other words, the authors lard their argument with a straw man that ignores the main point — testosterone drives male puberty, which increases muscle mass, bone density and size, and a host of other side effects beneficial to athletic achievement. They also conveniently omit the fact that Caster Semenya is genetically male, despite being phenotypically female:

1) Caster Semenya Has XY Chromosomes

It’s absolutely mind-boggling that virtually every major outlet in the world reporting the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling yesterday has failed to mention one of the most important facts of the entire case. Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes. It was generally accepted by people following the case closely that Semenya was XY, but now it’s been confirmed as fact since the CAS press release specifically says, “The DSD covered by the Regulations are limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where the affected individual has XY chromosomes.” If she wasn’t XY, the IAAF’s regulations wouldn’t apply to her and she’d have no reason to challenge them.

(In case you forgot what you learned in junior high biology, typically females have XX chromosomes while males are XY).

How the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBC could all leave this CRUCIAL fact out of their reporting is beyond me. Not a single one of them mentioned it at all. It should have been in the lead paragraph of every story so people like my mother, who sent me a confused email after she saw an article on Semenya, can really understand what this is all about. Instead, the closest we get to the truth was that some of the articles talked about how Semenya has intersex “traits” or “characteristics.” Let’s be real, if you are an XY woman, you are the very definition of what virtually everyone would think of as intersex.

The woke academy has taken over science discussion.

The Case Of JayCee Cooper And The Media's Trans Activist Stenography

It is hard, truly hard, to think of a dumber piece about athletic sanctioning bodies permitting M2F transsexuals to compete against biological women, yet here is NBC parroting the trans activist party line. "It’s not fair to genetically eliminate an entire group of people," said JayCee Cooper, whom Powerlifting USA banned from female competition. @SwipeRight put together an excellent thread response on Twitter, the key parts of which are these two tweets:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to support them. Trans activists make the following extraordinary claim: reducing testosterone levels for 1 year totally eliminates the advantages bestowed upon males by virtue of going through male puberty.

7/21

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) April 29, 2019

But when asked for the extraordinary evidence necessary to support this claim nothing is provided. Meanwhile, we have every reason in the world to suspect an advantage persists, b/c reducing T levels for 1 year does not reverse most traits relevant to athletic performance.

8/21

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) April 29, 2019

Transgender activists thus employ ignorance at the heart of their arguments, disguising the lack of actual data on M2F transgender athletic performance as a justification for permitting such individuals to compete with women. The poor quality of the data is a feature, not a bug, as made very clear by Dr. Antonia Lee in Medium, who chides the IOC for using politically-motivated, low-power studies that aren't even well-constructed.

 I’ve written about the methodological flaws in the work of IOC consensus meeting participant, Joanna Harper before (5). Let me be as clear as possible: if you decide to do an observational study, you need to follow the appropriate, recognised and demanding observational study guidelines (6). Failing to do so means that, “any claim coming from an observational study is likely to be wrong” (7). I have nothing against Harper personally; my point is that she is neither an epidemiologist nor a sports scientist and simply doesn’t seem to know how to carry out meaningful health or sports science research.

But you would learn none of this from reading the NBC News story, which frames the whole matter as one of "inclusion", with opponents unfairly "dehumanizing" M2F transsexuals. Despite the spin, USA Powerlifting's position paper is clear — and fair, to biological women:

Through analysis the impact of maturation in the presence naturally occurring androgens as the level necessary for male development, significant advantages are had, including but not limited to increased body and muscle mass, bone density, bone structure, and connective tissue.  These advantages are not eliminated by reduction of serum androgens such as testosterone yielding a potential advantage in strength sports such as powerlifting.

The IOC (and the International Powerlifting Federation) have not endorsed M2F powerlifters, surprisingly, and the current rules permit individual sports the option at their discretion to include transsexual women. Hopefully, other sports will expand exclusions in the name of fairness to biological women.

Sunday Linkies

• The ACLU has come out in favor of M2F participation in biological women's sporting events, an announcement that was immediately panned by Martina Navratilova:

  I love you ACLU, but you are wrong on this. Unless you want to completely remake what Women’s Sports means, there can be no blanket inclusion rule. There is nothing stereotypical about this- it’s about fairness and it’s about science. Thank you.

  — Martina Navratilova (@Martina) March 13, 2019

  The ACLU's source for this claim is a data-free essay from ... Everyday Feminism.
• Reason ran a fine essay on sex differences in athletics that probably won't do much to change the current situation, larded as it is with loud advocates resting on spectral evidence that doesn't really address the differences between M2F transgender athletes and biological women. 
• A terrific thread from @FondOfBeetles showing how adolescent boys routinely break records set by the best women in track. Opening shot:

  In 2004, I was privileged to watch Kelly Holmes win the female Olympic 800m gold, in a run that kept everyone on tenterhooks until that final glorious sprint finish. Her finishing time was 1:56.38. 1/ pic.twitter.com/6EkVF5ZFxe

  — Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) March 11, 2019

• A useful article from T Nation on the subject of transgender athletes:
  

  Most experts say that the average testosterone production for biological females ranges between 0.52 to 2.8 nmol/L. The Mayo Clinic put that range even lower (2). And while experts may vary in what they consider average among females, the consensus is almost always below 3 nanomoles/L.
  
  But remember, federations like the IOC require a male-born person to suppress and maintain testosterone production at 10 nanomoles/L.
  
  So even if a woman was genetically blessed with testosterone levels that reached 3 nmol/L, that would still be less than half of what a trans woman would be allowed to have during the competition. To look at it another way, her male-born competitor would have just over three times as much testosterone, even with hormone-altering drugs.

• Sex differences in the human brain show up before birth. The last refuge of the blank slate-ist is gone.
• Kirsten Gillibrand has zero endorsements. 
• Finland's government has collapsed following failed efforts to reform the country's healthcare delivery system.  This is interesting for a lot of reasons, not least because Finland has better per-capita spending on healthcare than France, which is often used as a model for US single-payer/M4A advocates (the light blue line below is Finland):
  
  
  

New Blog: FondOfBeetles

A fine new blog, FondOfBeetles, came into my view on Twitter with a long essay on sex segregation of athletics, and more context of what men competing against women would look like based on the existing record books. Excerpt:

A comparison of our 69kg Olympic weightlifting record holders suggests differently (Figure 6). Liao Hui (male; 166/198/359kg) and Oksana Slivenko (female; 123/156/276kg) were, at the time of their record breaking lifts, two people of the same weight and about an inch different in height. Hui outlifts Slivenko by 43kg in the snatch and 42kg in the clean & jerk, for a total of 85kg greater combined. 85kg is 13st5lb, about the weight of a typical male 100m sprinter, and over 30% of the female combined lift weight. Even when body size is approximately equivalent, females are not close to male strength.

The strongest female in the world. So, the 69kg male weightlifter hammers the 69kg female weightlifter on strength. Where are the females who are stronger than Hui? How tall and heavy are they? The answer is, in Olympic weightlifting, they don’t exist. Holding the records in the heaviest female weight category (+90kg) is Tatiana Kashirina, with 155/193/348kg (Figure 6). You’ve read that correctly. The male record holder for the 69kg category can outlift the female record holder in the top category, a female who has a 4 inch height advantage and over 6 stone of weight on him, a female who might reasonably be described as the strongest woman in the world. Clearly, the strength performance gap between males and females is not one of scale.

Kashirina would beat the male records in the 56kg (139/171/307kg) and 62kg (154/183/333kg) categories (21). Chen Lijun holds the clean & jerk and combined records at 62kg; he’s 1.62cm (5’4’’). So the strongest woman in the world has a shot against males who are 46kg (7st3lb) lighter and at least six inches shorter than her. She’s only lifting 13% more than the male record holder in a weight category almost half her bodyweight.

Sidebar link coming presently.

Martina Navratilova Backtracks On M2F Transsexuals As “Cheats”

Martina Navratilova backtracked on her comments calling M2F transsexuals competing in womens’ events “cheats”:

I know that my use of the word ‘cheat’ caused particular offence among the transgender community. I’m sorry for that because I certainly was not suggesting that transgender athletes in general are cheats. I attached the label to a notional case in which someone cynically changes gender, perhaps temporarily, to gain a competitive advantage. We should not be blind to the possibility and some of these rules are making that possible and legal. The context may be different, but the case of Lance Armstrong, and the harm he did to his sport, is surely instructive.

Navratilova drifts toward something that she can’t quite bring herself to say — the idea of excluding transsexuals from Olympic (and other) sports on the grounds that adding new categories amounts to a change in the historical categories:

It would be a big mistake for women’s tennis, which of course I know best, to be broken up into too many categories. Male and female, juniors, seniors and veterans, able-bodied and wheelchair, seems enough to me, certainly at the top level.

...

But we should be wary of solving the transgender problem (if I may call it that) by creating further categories. For while they are intended to be fair and inclusive, multiple categories can also fragment a sport and cause confusion.

 The good news is that Navratilova appears uninterested in dropping the subject; "The communists tried to shut me up 45 years ago and look how that worked out...". Neither, apparently, are dumb hot takes like this one at OutSports, which considers multiple cases of trans women suing their way into (or getting bounced from) women's competition as "progress", and hilariously compares Navratilova to Nazis, employing "Joseph Goebbels nomenclature". Once more: the argument against trans women competing against biological women in sports rests on the idea that sports are a game of populations. Just because some trans women were defeated by biological women doesn't mean that, with enough time and trans women contestants, trans women wouldn't eventually fill the record books on games designed to fairly accommodate biological women's different and lesser physical capacities.

More Transsexuals Winning Girls' Events, Martina Navratilova Hates It

• Transsexual sprinters placed first and second at a Connecticut high school indoors event.
• Martina Navratilova hit a fabulous return shot about transsexuals competing in womens' categories and took heat for it. I have asked her for the basis of her Times piece.
• The IOC is okay with transsexuals competing in womens' events, but their own guidelines permit "females" with penises — highly suggestive of their political aims.
• At bottom of a lot of the claims that trans women should be competitive with biological women is a 2004 study in the European Journal of Endocrinology by Louis J. G. Gooren and Mathijs C. M. Bunck studying muscle mass in n=19 transwomen, and concluding that after a year, muscle mass had diminished to the point where "it is justifiable that reassigned M-F compete with other women", while ignoring height, size, and bone differences.
• Update 2019-02-26: A pretty good article at Velo News on the post-Rachel McKinnon landscape on M2F transsexuals competing in women's events. Something I didn't know, and seems to have been missed in the fracas over McKinnon's victory: the reigning women's cycling champion, Sarah Fader (née Caravella), resigned in protest minutes before the races were to begin, despite the fact that she beat McKinnon in both the 200m and 500m preliminary time trials.

  Track racer Sarah Fader believes the IOC’s rules create an unfair situation for cis women (cisgender refers to individuals whose gender identity matches their birth gender).
  
  Known by some cycling fans for her maiden name, Caravella, Fader raced in the U.S. professional road scene from 2006-2015. Fader was set to race against Dr. McKinnon in the masters finals in Los Angeles. She was the defending masters world champion in the event, and she set the fastest time in the qualifying heats. She beat Dr. McKinnon in both a 200- and 500-meter time trial during the weekend.
  
  Fader, however, told me that she felt that racing against Dr. McKinnon was simply not fair. Dr. McKinnon stands six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds. Fader, by contrast, is  5-foot-5 and weighs 135 pounds. So minutes before the finals were set to start, she pulled out of the competition entirely.
  
  “I thought that doing it this way was my own form of protest,” Fader said. “I knew that I personally did not agree with the situation. I don’t want to compete in a sport where the rules are unfair.”

• Included in that Velo News piece is a good link to a Stuff (New Zealand) article interviewing Otego University physiology professor Alison Heather, who says "She is adamant international sporting regulation bodies such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have rushed a decision to include transgender athletes in male and female categories, as there has not been enough research."
• Update 2019-02-27: More linky goodness: the IOC's policy (PDF) has no mention of any studies of the situation, and neither USA Cycling's policy.
• The American Spectator has a fine essay on the subject:

  A transgender training expert says this later in the same article:
  

  “The gender identity doesn’t matter, it’s the testosterone levels,” said Harper, who studies transgender athletes. “Trans girls should have the right to compete in sports. But cisgender girls should have the right to compete and succeed, too. How do you balance that? That’s the question.”

  Harper is wrong. Biology matters. The DNA. The sex of the baby, child, teen, adult matters. The hormones make a difference but they are secondary.
  Think of it this way. Lance Armstrong and the rest of the doping cyclists (which is about all of them, at this point) have extraordinary biology before they doped. A woman with similar testosterone levels could not even come close to the last place male finisher in the Tour de France and cycling is a lower body-focused sport where men and women have more muscle strength/per size parity. The biology of the males before the doping is already an advantage. The extra hormones are a boost.

• Madeleine Kerns at National Review:
  

  In December, Navratilova tweeted: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”
  McKinnon was not pleased by this and began a tirade against Navratilova. In her Sunday Times essay, Navratilova describes this behavior as bullyish and argues that, while she feels able to take a stand, she worries that other women will be “cowed into silence or submission.”
  

  
  

  Likewise, when a spokesperson for the organization Fair Play for Women (FPFW) was invited by the BBC to discuss Navratilova’s comments about trans participation in female sport, McKinnon wrote on Twitter: “I will not participate in a discussion panel that takes them [FPFW] seriously and gives them a platform.”
  FPFW were then disinvited by the BBC, and McKinnon boasted about having the platform to himself.

  What an appalling state of affairs. 
• Speaking of Fair Play for Women, their website is chock-full of resources, including, especially, their science links. I highly recommend following their Twitter account, @fairplaywomen.
• Something FPFW tweeted recently, an excellent summary of the scientific landscape at Medium by Dr. Antonia Lee, including an incredible call for the retraction of a widely-cited paper purporting to justify M2F trans inclusion in sports on evidentiary quality grounds.
• Update 2019-03-02: This keeps trickling on: A M2F transsexual hit the automatic NCAA qualifying time in the 60m hurdles in New Hampshire.
• A M2F transgender woman won a 54 km Dutch beach cycling race (English Google Translate version).

More Women Beaten By Transsexual Women In Sex-Segregated Sports

Comes a report now that a transgender female is dominating Australian handball; some months back, I noted a transgender woman winning the UCI Masters championship; a post-victory interview contained this silliness (formatting all original):

VN: Do you feel like you have an unfair advantage because you are a transgender athlete?
Rachel McKinnon: No, absolutely not. If you look at my results at Canadian nationals, in the 500 I was like eighth place (editor: Dr. McKinnon has always competed in the female category). At masters worlds, for the 500 I was a very disappointing fourth. In the Keirin at Canadian nationals, I was fourth. I haven’t won any elite UCI races. I got a third in the Keirin at Trexlertown in June.

On it goes. Because "she" didn't win every time, we are supposed to say, well, fairness prevailed or something. The idiocy and narcissism of transsexuals, who wish to deny the substantial advantages their pre-hormone treatments confer upon them, needs mass public condemnation until this nonsense is chased back to the academy where it belongs.

Transgender Weightlifter Smashes Women's Records

But, you know, gender is a social construct. I suspect Caster Semenya wants a do-over. I'm sure this is completely unrelated to testosterone.