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Studies on HRTs effects on the body, expessly on athletic abiliy
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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It's a minefield. At the moment, most public research is generated by folk with ulterior motives using deliberately skewed assumptions and comparisons. The ones that aren't lack sufficient data to show meaningful conclusions.
Joanna Harper is doing work in this space, but she's in the latter category.
Going off your hint, I found this review from Harper that is pretty interesting:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865.abstract
Like you said, there’s not enough to really form solid conclusions, but it’s a nice summary of the research.
It's a good example of the sort of thing I was talking about too.
That summary you linked to isn't measuring athletic ability but it will often be talked about as if it is. What they found was that lean body mass was different to cis women, and then they imply that it leads to athletic advantage, without ever actually exploring that part.
But on average, trans womens bodies and frames are larger than cis womens. Body mass scales in a roughly cubic correlation with body size, rather than a linear manner, so measures of lean body mass area don't mean much when they don't account for that. I have no idea of all of te measured studies do account for it, or if the meta study accounted for it.
Similarly, it mentions a difference in strength, but what is that difference? Is it upper body strength? Grip strength? Arm strength? And what impact does that different have on athletic ability? That's not explored.
Studies like this are important, but they are not the answers, because they don't actually assess the thing that's being talked about, which is athletic performance. What they do is look at measures in isolation, with no understanding of how that impacts overally athletic performance, particularly in trans bodies, in which assumptions about cis bodies simply may not apply.
Yet, despite that, they are used to exclude trans folk from sports.
Yeah, if they compared similar sizes of cis and trans people it would be a better study.