Adam Zivo: Banning transwomen from female sports is not discrimination

Skate Canada has said that it will no longer host major events in Alberta after the province banned all males — including transgender-identifying ones — from competing in female sports. This is disgraceful: female athletes should not be used as bargaining chips in an ill-advised campaign to undermine athletic fairness and sex-based rights.

The organization, which governs figure skating in Canada, claimed that its “national standards for safe and inclusive sport” are incompatible with Alberta’s new “Fairness and Safety in Sport Act,” presumably because the latter bans transwomen from competing in female sports.

This messaging was quickly amplified by Canada’s Secretary of State (Sport) Adam van Koeverden, who published a statement supporting Skate Canada and indirectly condemning Alberta’s policies as transphobic and unscientific.

But there is nothing — absolutely nothing — discriminatory or unscientific about these policies. The blunt reality is that sex segregation is necessary for fair sports competition because males, regardless of how they identify or what hormones they take, are far stronger than females on average.

These differences are both intuitively obvious and well-documented by peer-reviewed studies that, for the most part, use reliable research methodologies.

Male physical advantages are measurable from an early age, before puberty even begins. A 2016 study published in the European Journal of Sport Science, for example, analyzed the fitness data of 424,000 Greek schoolchildren and found that six-year-old males showed noticeably greater endurance and jumping capacity than same-aged females.

Another 2013 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which examined 85,000 Australian children aged 9-17 years old, found similar results: nine-year-old males sprinted 10 per cent faster, jumped 10 per cent further and completed 33 per cent more pushups than female peers. Their grip strength was also 14 per cent stronger, which matters as this metric is considered an excellent indicator of general strength.

After puberty floods male bodies with strength-enhancing testosterone, these performance gaps only widen.

A 2023 study (published in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation) tested 180 healthy youth and found that males aged 14 or older were far better jumpers than females, thanks to larger muscle volumes that aid explosive movement. These differences were so profound that, for the 20-22 year-old age group, it could be statistically inferred that the average male would perform better than 99.9 per cent of same-aged females.

This is just one study among many that illustrate superior male post-puberty strength. There is a similarly rich body of scientific evidence showing that these differences meaningfully impact sports performance.

A 2010 article in the journal of Sports Science and Medicine examined data from 82 Olympic-level events and found that, from the early 1980s onwards, male athletes consistently performed around 10 per cent better than their female counterparts. Sex-based differences varied considerably depending on sport type — with only a 8.9 per cent gap for swimming races, a 17.5 per cent gap for jumps and a 36.8 per cent gap for weightlifting.

Given the stability of this trend, the authors suggested that “women’s performances at the high level will never match those of men.”

These findings were later corroborated by another 2020 paper published in Sports Medicine, whose authors, Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, found that elite male athletes performed 10-50 per cent better than their female counterparts, depending on the sport, with this gap being more pronounced for activities relying on explosive strength.

Using preexisting studies and data, Hilton and Lundberg also demonstrated that males who undergo medicalized gender transitions do not lose their performance advantages.

Post-pubescent males have roughly 40 per cent more muscle mass than females, but the two authors found twelve longitudinal studies which suggest that one year of testosterone suppression only induces a 3-5 per cent muscle loss. In other words: newly-transitioned transwomen are still roughly a third more muscular than females, entailing considerable strength advantages.

Hilton and Lundberg also cited a 2019 study, published in Endocrine Connections, which tested 249 transwomen a year into hormone therapy and found that their average grip strength (which, once again, is an excellent indicator of general strength) was weaker than 75 per cent of males, but stronger than 90 per cent of females.

Data on longer-term testosterone suppression are scarce, but the authors identified a 2008 study, published in the journal Bone, which tested 23 transwomen who had been on hormones for a median period of eight years (with a minimum treatment length of three years). These participants had only 17 per cent less muscle mass than a height- and age-matched control group of 46 healthy males, suggesting that they had persistent strength advantages over females. The small sample size warrants some skepticism of these results, though.

While there is almost no sex-based research into figure skating (which makes sense, given how niche the subject is), one 2012 study published in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine examined 36 skaters and found that male skaters consistently jumped more powerfully than females. The authors also concluded that jumping power appeared to explain about half of the differences in competitive rankings among the participants. But again, one should be wary of small sample sizes.

Overall, when one looks at the science, it is clear that transwomen maintain the strength advantages inherent to their biological sex, even after years of hormone therapy. This is why sports organizations across the world, including the International Olympic Committee, are banning them from participating in female sports. This isn’t discrimination — just a sober response to biological reality and the need for fairness.

National Post