# Do trans girl athletes have an advantage? \[Moderated title for clarity\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 1, 2021, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-trans-girl-athletes-have-an-advantage-moderated-title-for-clarity/945447 "2021-07-01T17:36:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 101
**Author:** ![WalterBishop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/aeb1de/32.png) [@WalterBishop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WalterBishop)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2021, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-trans-girl-athletes-have-an-advantage-moderated-title-for-clarity/945447/101 "2021-07-03T22:00:41Z")
> [@HughGoply](#): > > To keep this on girls in school. There aren’t boys’ and girls’ hormones. There are human hormones. Now, some of these hormones are different on average in boys and girls. But there are ranges within boys and girls, too. And when these averages were studied, trans experiences were excluded. We can’t say a particular trans girl’s testorone level is unusual for a girl when the studies excluded trans girls from the ranges of girls’ hormones. I’m also unaware of any school association that excludes girls based on hormone levels. I think we may be talking at cross purposes. My understanding of transgenderism is that - leaving aside intersex people and people with any one of a handful of extremely rare chromosomal conditions - male and female sexes are fixed biological categories. Gender, on the other hand, is fluid. So, male and female is fixed, but girl/woman and boy/man are not. This means you can have a _girl_ (gender) in a _male_ (sex) body, going through _male_ (sex) puberty and having their development guided by _male_ (sex) hormones like testosterone, but this doesn’t invalidate her _identity_ (gender) as a girl/woman, because gender identity is distinct from sex and is amenable to change. That’s my understanding, at any rate. I’m far from an expert on this. Now, it’s well known that the average teenage male has much more testosterone in his system than the average teenage female. Indeed, the average teenage male has much more testosterone in his system than a teenage female with _higher_ than average testosterone. In your previous post, you said: _“Some of these hormones are different on average in boys and girls”_, but the word ‘different’ is doing quite a lot of work. According to this source ( [Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6391653/) ) the average teenage male produces _thirty times_ as much testosterone as females of any age. While the levels of some sex hormones are different on average in males and females, the difference, on average, is vast and insurmountable. Now, I acknowledge your point that trans experiences were excluded from the studies from which these averages were derived, but if gender is distinct from biological sex, then there’s no reason to believe their inclusion would’ve influenced the results in either direction. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no evidence that - prior to treatment - the testosterone levels of a typical transgender girl are different to those of a typical cisgender boy. Therefore, if a transgender girl is allowed to compete against cisgender girls then, all other things being equal, she would expect to win because of the higher amount of male sex hormones to which she was exposed during puberty. That’s why I don’t feel it’s fair to allow transgender girls to compete with cisgender girls. > [@HughGoply](#): > > But so what? We could look at all sorts of populations within the catagory of girls and see differences on average in those populations. If girls of Norwegian descent are taller on average than girls in general, do they have an “advantage” and should they be excluded? Of course not. It’s the same for trans girls. They may have higher amounts of some hormones, but that’s just their biology. In this example, the Norwegian girls would have an advantage, but it’s not the same _type_ of advantage that transgender teenage girls have over cisgender teenage girls. To further the analogy, if the sport were basketball, and Norwegian girls were, on average, fourteen feet tall, then I’d imagine they _would_ be excluded. There’d be no point competing against them. > [@HughGoply](#): > > First, we should detach sports from school. Second, we should re-examine the sports we support as a society. There are sports where women have an advantage on average. Support those sports. I agree that these sports should certainly get more support than they currently do. However, the number of sports in which girls have an advantage is very small, and it excludes virtually _all_ the most popular school sports (football, basketball, short and middle-distance running, all jumping and throwing events, nearly all gymnastic events, soccer, tennis, swimming, and many others). These sports are the ones which most people, including most transgender people, enjoy participating in. For this reason, I don’t think supporting the more niche activities in which women perform better would actually do anything to solve the main issue. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-trans-girl-athletes-have-an-advantage-moderated-title-for-clarity/945447)._