Trans athletes in women's sports: Is this fair?

While all that seems reasonable, there is a reason for gendered sports - I'm sure some don't need to be (chess). But, I think the difference between biological men and women is too substantial. I think when we look back in 10 years time, while trans people may still be under represented in sports overall, they will likely be over represented in the top 10 positions, particularly in women's sport. I don't find that particularly entertaining or desirable to watch and it is reasonable for biological women to be concerned about this possibility.

Maybe, we should take a page from golf and assess a handicap for any competitors outside the average or just on everyone. Then eliminate women's and men's sport and just have general sport! Sports especially like track, marathon, canoe, rowing, and all nonphysical/non team sports.

How hard did you train for your swimming competition Sabine?

Who decided that allowing prepubescent trns people to compete isn't controversial? You? It's very controversial, and not just for parity in sport, but for the grooming and sexualization of children by parents or other other influences which are interfering with the sexual development of children.
Many people believe there are differences in male and female even before puberty.
Also, it isn't "common" for people to be called CIS gendered, it is common for them to be called by their gender, without any need for qualifiers, because except for rare outliers, there are only two genders.
you say there is "significant overlap" in testosterone levels of male and female athlete, but then display a bell curve where it's obvious that there are profound differences.
Another thing that nobody seems to grasp is that hormone therapy targets a range of hormone levels at the discretion of the patient and doctor.
The doctor might not be trying to attain a test level of 0, but with feedback from the patient perhaps trying to get the maximum levels found in females, or slightly above that maximum and well into the range of male athletes. There is no "standard", as there are variations in male and female, there are also variations in trans people, and various treatment regimens to attain the desired outcome. could be super effeminate, or totally masculine TomBoy.
Any female would be at a disadvantage, because if their doctor prescribed hormones to reach those levels, it's cheating. If you cheat twice though, well it's not cheating?

How can someone competing in the Olympics argue that they have no advantage? I can understand if they were weak AF and could not qualify for the games, then they can say they have no advantage, but there would also be no reason to argue.

Even 300s ranked male born tennis player can easily beat the best female born pro player.
If trans women is allowed to compete in women tournament, any those male player, who never have chance ro make money in male tournament, can easily declare himself trans, spend two years in hormone therapy, and then make serious money in female tournament.

If it is okay because sport is unfair anyway, then why we have women only tournament. Let's just mix them together.

let's look at sports in general, they all look for athletes with biological advantages. The NBA before every years draft have what is called draft combines. The potential draftees and measured for height, wingspan, hand size, etc. Players are drafted based on the combination of skills and biological advantages. Wilt Chamberlain had major biological advantages over 99% of his opponents. Michael Jordan's huge hands were a big part of his ability to control the ball with one hand while in the air or on the floor. Champions are made by the combination of biological advantages and skills/talent/work ethic

definitely there is no such thing as a trans. it's not a thing. you can't do it through any technique, technology, therapy nor surgery. all of the people and friends i personally know who have tried this (11 people) have failed utterly and/or killed themselves or killed someone else.

This was a rather clumsy attempt at brushing against a hot topic to get traction. Rule of thumb - rather don't do that. The basic "logic" of your video is flawed. Saying I see some other things that are also unfair, why can't we have this unfair thing as well, is like me saying why can't I dump my oil barrels into the sea after the BP incident in the Bay of Mexico.

Point is, much the same way top athletes or tallest people or strongest people are always going to be male, if you let trans women into women sports, no woman will ever be at the top of her game/discipline. Besides a few that overlap (of course there's A woman taller than A man or faster or stronger), the top will permanently be reserved for people who are not women.

Following your argument, or rather "argument", I'd expect to see a junior MM kid in the cage. I mean, after all, there are many other things that are unfair and athletes shouldn't be burdened with fair/unfair.

I hope this brief reaction helped you make sense of your rather senseless video. Thank you for reading and stick with telescopes and the thing you understand. We don't need another Jordan Peterson.

I'm a strong supporter of gay and trans rights. Always have been. But this is a legitimate question. I worry that athletes who are born female are facing a no- win situation here.

So now the angle is, well yes trans women have an advantage for sure BUT sports isnt fair anyway so its ok? GTFO with that nonsense. We separated male and female sports for a reason....... if you think its not fair then remove male and female and see what happens..........

Frau Hossenfelder, bitte beschränken Sie Ihr Leben nicht auf Wissenschaft oder die Physik allein. Mit diesem delikaten Thema bewiesen Sie, dass Sie zu mehr fähig sind. Bei ungefähr der Hälfte des Videos kam in mir die Frage auf, warum ich Sie nicht in der Politik sehe.

You shouldn't be using the word "assigned" at birth. it's the sex they are observed to have at birth and before before birth. Assigned as a word was introduced by trans activists to suggest that it is something that is not fixed but just given to you randomly by a doctor or your mother and therefore can be changed. it isn't. and don't use the word CIS either for pretty much the same reasons. It's an attempt to split women into two groups so that you're still talking about so-called trans women as if they are actually women and there are two groups of women. But this is not the case. There are not two groups of women. There is just women. it's one of the sexes. Trans women are men. No amount of drugs or physical mutilation is going to change that fact.

regression based sports! I'm all for it :)

These MEN that call themselves a trans Woman are far from from being a woman. The only way to be a woman is to be born Female, anything else is not real. A born male is by nature stronger than a born female. These trans should only compete against the same sex assigned at birth. Born females should only compete against other born female and born male compete only against other born male. These trans against Men they end up with last place but when they compete against female they get first place. This is cheating a this rate women will never get first place.

It’s obviously not fair. Men and women are very different and the Olympic records are clear proof

they should have their own class. not a perfect solution, but at least it would stop a small % of people ruining the competition for the majority.

This is truly a complex issue, especially looking at it in the context of fairness. But I do think you use false equivalency when comparing inherently long armed swimmers to say, trans women swimmers. Is it fair that Phelps was born with longer arms? The difference is Phelps didn’t go and surgically shrink his arms after puberty and then compete in the “little arm” Olympics. Whereas trans women deliberately change their physicality and compete in their “updated” gender category, this in light of innate male characteristics that do not vanish entirely, as you illustrated. As a woman swimmer myself, I would definitely feel more “cheated” competing against a trans woman than a woman who has inherently long arms. Because that long armed woman didn’t deliberately make her arms long then compete against me, even if that woman believed her whole life she had long arms trapped in her short arm body. You bring up genetic engineering in the end, which could officially end professional sports. That could be true, especially if there is not a set of agreed upon global rules and regulations around it…. Love your work and thank you for sharing it in such a reachable way!

This is dumb, women should be against trans in their sport. Women should give up being pros/sports as their career while trannies take over their sports. All that hard work isn't going to beat genetics.

At this moment I think transgender women and transgender men should compete both in the men category because they do count as women on doping;
Perhaps winning versus men would be a much bigger achievement for them.

I love how how none bias you are when presenting your data

please huwomanity, tell me that im not the only one to suggest this...re athletes...men v men, women v women, m2f v m2f, f2m v f2m... undecided v same...fuck me up the ass, (metaphorically)... its too obvious...WTF PEOPLE, x vs x...y vs y, xy vs xy, xx vs xx, yy vs yy....its so straight forward, i must be from another planet;;;reminds me...bye, im off

Thanks for the information, as usual great job.

Yeah, less boring - more entertaining! I love to see sis women getting stuffed by trans women! And since it's 100% of the time without exception, I'm always satisfied! I'm just waiting for massive dudes who identify as handicapped to enter the special Olympics so I can watch even more extreme smearing!

I think maybe for trans women on hormones who are endurance athletes, like cyclist where lean seems to predominate in androgynous cis female cyclists, they may actually be at a disadvantage

NOT FAIR!!!

Get the government entirely out of it and let those involved decide for themselves.

"Maybe the solution is that in the end we'll all just do esports" Well good luck with that. All top athletes are men. One exception I remember is a female StarCraft player. But she was biologically male.

please stay with your scientific topics.

5.8K people, don't believe in science, or it doesn't suit their agendas.

Just do away with all women's sports then. And then in sports requiring strength, speed, and size, there will be no women competing.

Clearly a lot of people have an issue with this, and it's also weakening/killing true women's sports. Why not set aside 2 additional categories?...Trans Men's Sports, and Trans Women's Sports. This is about deliberate advantage being used, much like steroids -- which is why they are banned in professional sports.

Professional sports will INCREASE with genetic engineering. The NFL is already amazing, imagine what happens with faster runnning backs zig zagging like Barry Sanders, longer pass plays with incrediable catches, seemingly impossible interceptions, and linebackers too fast to block.

Isn't fair. Period.

people like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child. This is just a bigot justifying bigotry for other bigots

science should not be an indicator of peoples freedoms and rights.

there once was "science" that showed the difference of caucasian and african people, which then was used to deny black peoples civil rights.

there always have been trys to "prove" that "gayness" was a social fad - to force people into re-"education" to not be gay - so called conversion therapies.

humanity isnt a matter of skulls, gayness wasnt a social fad, and trans isnt either.

its the same try to rape science into doing a right wing agendas bidding to deliver "reasoning" for persecution - and the fact sabine isnt aware of that, is making me physically ill and disgusted.

you know the nazis had "well reason science facts" behind their persecution of jews and other "social unfit" people?

re-consider your stance.

you can science all the way you want- seek the truth, but using your pursuit of knowledge against other peoples pursuit of happiness and freedom is ILL INTENT

Not “trans people” – this debate is about whether men (who might or might not have even modified their bodies) and women who dope on testosterone should be in female sports. Surprise, the men (mostly) say yes to being in female sports and the women (mostly) say no

So that we can think like that of our geniusity is of course rare so that also our male and female state is not only two that we can think of is not only truth that we should ever limited.

Sabine is vastly out of her depth and here and starting to show signs of delusional uber mensch. She should stick to what she is qualified for, but like she says if someone can they will monetize themself.

So everyone gets a participation award. Sports has never been about fairness, it was supposed to be about who trained the best to succeed at their level. Sports has become ruled a lot like American laws. Someone will call unfair because it isn't written to address everyone's difference. Then all sorts of exclusions and special circumstances are included. Then no one knows what to do. Somewhere we have to draw a line for who qualifies for competing. If any changes or modifications are made to the human body to improve their competitiveness in any way, that should disqualify them (that would exclude normal surgeries like having your tonsils removed). I know that doesn't sound fair to those who want to compete, but they always have other options in life. Would it be fair if the Hulk competed in wrestling? The Flash competed in running? Or, more realistic possibility, the six million dollar man competing in sports? We gotta draw the line somewhere.

You rightfully deduced, that yes, trans-women are unfairly better in sports than women, given the same rules and weight-classes. You then muddied the water with non-fairness in general and entertainment value. Yes, there will always be some phenom reigning in any sport for a given time-span, but given the possibility, men WILL simply take over womens sports, -for good. For ever.

Natural fairness... it is the only acceptable type of fairness

i would have reached 200kg and i go heavy weight boxing and we rip off their meat till they reach my weight class

An all out ban on transgender women in women's sports is not the answer however there may be an argument for each disciplines setting out legislation for its own integrity. For instance, perhaps trans women have too much of an advantage in individual sports like weightlifting while no significant advantage in team sports like softball, volleyball, or sports that do not require strength like car racing.

Excluding all transwomen from sports is not the answer since you end up painting everyone with the same brush while statistics have shown that trans women are not at all dominating in the highest levels of sport. For the most part, this has yet to become a significant problem worth heavy legislation.

"I suspect, a century from now, professional athletics will not exist; It creates too much incentive for unethical behavior."

Like men transitioning to become women and take advantage of an unfair biological advantage? Nah. There's 2 much money in the industry.

I think there's a problem with too analytical an approach to this, which Sabine is bound to bring. It might seem logical to consider a vast array of aspects of any person and "correct for" differences by some algorithm, discovering that the person came last in the race actually won, but it's nonsense ported in from physics and this is human biology and psychology. We would have no idea what aspects to measure, nor how to calculate the handicap relating to each. This is almost an identity politics understanding of fairness, and it isn't of interest in the messy reality of people's engagement with sports and other competitive processes. Fairness has been conceptualised as equity - equality of outcome (because people have "unfair advantages") - when of course the motivation for sport, and the fun of watching it, relate to the extremes of athletic ability. Sport isn't meant to be "fair" in the sense of "everybody must win".

But in the messiness of human relations, there's a more limited fairness that is abused when traditional categories are undermined or invaded, as has been happening in women's sport. Women aren't upset because someone faster or stronger than them has beaten them, they're upset when that person has gained entry by breaking those categorical boundaries we expect. A better woman athlete isn't a problem, just someone to motivate harder work. A male athlete in there is an insult and often is demotivating. And that problem stems from the phenomenon of trans-identified males (and females).

From what I have read, Sabine's take on the number of intersex people is misleading, because the sex of the majority can be determined as male or female, and examples where male and female internal sex organs exist are vanishingly small. Tests in those cases establish a legal sex for the person, which is usually uncontested. The wider debate about "transgender rights" is endlessly confused by referring to intersex conditions, but the vast majority of trans-identified people are unambiguously male or female. Furthermore, the trans activist position is that one's gender is whatever one declares it is, requiring no medication whatsoever. Trans-identifying males can therefore (unless rules set by the sport's governing body proclude it) just apply and take part. Hence, those rules are attempts to ameliorate the problem by filtering out those with too much testosterone, or on the age of "transition", etc. If it wasn't for the nonsense of gender ideology, the problem wouldn't arise. It would be extremely rare for anyone to be objectively recognised as the opposite sex to that recorded at birth (generally, those would be people with rare intersex conditions).

The underlying principle there is identifying the underlying nature of a person, so an objective observation, not the subjective declaration, and this also allows a relatively simple remedy for genetic modifications - this can simply exclude a person from the sporting categories of "natural humans", in the same way bionic implants or drugs exclude people. Any number of new categories can be devised to suit the the drug-enhanced, or the genetically enhanced, or the bionic, and should be devised for the trans-identifying. Some will be upset, because they tell themselves "trans women are women," but we don't have to buy into their belief system.

It’s absolutely fucking awesome that you found out trans men gain a lot more muscle mass and trans women lose a little bit. I’d love to throw a big fucking party for you finding that information.
HOWEVER… you never compared the data to a baseline. So what if trans men gain 6% muscle mass. How do they compare to other men? Do they still have 12% less muscle mass than the average male athlete?
And what about trans women? Cool, they lose 1 or 2%… but how do they compare to other women athletes? Do they have 16% more?

This is a major hole in your data.

Clever way to advance a transgender agenda through bogus science. Sad.

Intersex has nothing to do with the delusion that is Trans.

I look at this more simplistically. Males and females both make estrogen. In males a low T-High Estrogen levels can be expressed in morphology or not. High E low T in male boys and adults can express as excess body fat and large fatty chest tissue resembling breasts. The High E, low T does not affect the ability to maintain erection and procreate as a regular male. As for gender and for sports, if you were born with penis and testicles you compete in male areana if you are born with vagina you compete as a woman. If you are born with both penis/testicles and a vagina, you compete in the category of gender that you choose after you have made the choice. Also to bar a female born with internal testicles that secrete testosterones is barring a natural anomaly within this person and should not occur, as such anomalies are within the range of normal genetic anomalies and are not due to tinkering. High testosterone in females and low testosterone in males should be irrelevant to the degree they naturally occur. An example of how to prepare a female athlete born with vagina and estrogen producing organelles is to engage her in sports activity at 11 or 12 and inject her with doses of testosterone until she is ready to compete in professional or Olympic sports. Pull her off the testosterone about a year before the competition or perhaps less and at the time of the competition she has had the benefit of testosterone and early sports training but should register low normal testosterone and normal estrogen at the time of competition. This was an accusation against the USSR for years. Hormones can be manipulated without removal or cancellation of the biological genitalia. However, those same genitalia in both genders DETERMINES the biological gender and the presence of external genitalia is the best confirmation of gender. Easy to observe in a medical setting with no blood work or excessive thought. Penis = male, vagina = female with no signs of external tampering.