British female Olympians on Tuesday lined up to criticize the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sport, as debate rages over whether transgender women retain unfair physical advantages after taking cross-sex hormones.
The row exploded in October last year, when Rachel McKinnon became the first transgender woman to win a track cycling world title, and was reignited when tennis great Martina Navratilova last month criticized the inclusion of trans women.
“I believe it is unfair in the extreme to expect women simply to move over and make way for male-to-female transitioning athletes,” Sharron Davies, who won a silver medal at the 1980 Olympics, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
“I don’t think you can deny that young boys that have gone through puberty have certain advantages that women will not ever get,” Paula Radcliffe, who holds the women’s world record in the marathon, told the BBC.
Since 2016, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has allowed male-to-female athletes to compete if their testosterone levels remain below a certain level for a year.
The hormone increases muscle mass, strength and the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen.
When trans women take cross-sex hormones, their body fat increases and muscle mass decreases, while production of testosterone falls.
However, some campaigners and athletes have argued that they retain advantages in strength, height, bone structure and red blood cells — the main source of disagreement.
McKinnon said such claims were “not based in fact.”
“Not one trans person has ever qualified for an Olympics, let alone won a medal,” she said.
The IOC in 2004 allowed trans athletes in the Olympics if they had had gender reassignment surgery, and female-to-male athletes can now take part without restrictions, but there is little scientific research into trans people in sport.
A 2015 study of eight male-to-female trans runners by medical physicist Joanna Harper found their race times slowed so much that they retained no advantage over non-trans women.
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