Transgender Professional Athletes

[candy_coated_bitch]

Originally Posted by Allison W

Not a lot of overlap in actual testosterone levels per se, outside of cases where someone's gonads have been removed or the like, but the rest, yes.

(Off-topic: I like the bit about most professional women athletes outperforming the vast majority of cisgendered men. Male-supremacist types really rage over that. As an added bonus, the performance gap between men and women even at the athlete level has been shrinking over the years. The future is bright.)

Well, hormones can be measured with a blood test; I've had doctors do it. The ranges vary greatly within a given sex, but between them the difference is still pretty big. I wouldn't draw the line at "chosen gender," even as a transperson, but rather by the presence of what is probably the biggest sex-linked advantage, testosterone, and whether they're on it (for transmen) or no longer producing it in quantities abnormally high for a female athlete (for transwomen--and I think the "for a female athlete" is probably a meaningful qualifier, as it's not unusual for female athletes to have relatively high testosterone levels). Possibly even with an additional time qualifier, like two or three years of hormonal intervention, since it takes a while.

On transwomen's T levels, though, the recommended therapeutic level of testosterone for transwomen is actually very low in the female range. I haven't even had surgical interventions, just hormonal ones, myself, and I bring this up because even so I actually had blood tests showing T levels so far below the female range--even the recommended therapeutic range for transwomen--that my antiandrogens had to be reduced to raise them.

I didn't mean that hormone levels can't LITERALLY be measured. I meant that trying to develop a fair and just and feasible way of judging athletes' hormone levels would be ridiculous. Plus, it's a red herring in my opinion.

As you said--the gap between women and men athletes is becoming more and more narrow anyhow. There's something more going on there besides hormones. I don't think testosterone is the only, and maybe not even the most important, factor in athletic performance. That's why I think a discussion about hormones is a red herring: because really the issue is about transphobia. That's why people freak about this--it challenges our notions of biological sex and gender on a very basic level.

Sports is one of the last bastions where complete separation of men and women is seen as not only ok, but necessary. I think treading on that blows people's minds a bit and makes them panic.