Transwoman Takes First Place

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
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Something to consider here:

The world record in equipped powerlifting for women in the 181 class belongs to Laura Phelps with 1,770 total. The world record deadlift in that same class is 590. Equipped, with bench and squat suits, and the fact that Laura was using significant doses of AAS.

The world record in RAW powerlifting for men in the 132 lb class is 602. The WR for 181s is 791. The world record for raw total in the 181 lb class is 1951.

So what we have here is a comparison between a juicing, equipped female lifter and a raw male lifter (possibly also juicing, but the drug tested WRs don’t lessen this contrast)

a 132 lb lifter is out deadlifting equipped females–including heavy drug using females–50-60+ lbs heavier. Raw totals are significantly higher than equipped, non-drug tested female totals.

This is, at the very least, highly suggestive that a male transitioned to female has an unfair advantage in strength dependent sports. Will that trans athlete see a decrease in performance from their previous male self? Yes. Will they be brought down to an equivalent level to females their weight class. Highly unlikely in my view.

There is data that hyperandrogenic women (naturally occurring, not due to drug use) have higher bone mineral density, higher VO2 max. Data also show that visual-spatial perception is positively influenced by androgens and androgen level. These are all things that will not be likely whatsoever to “de-train” after 1 year of hormone therapy subsequent to a lifetime of male hormone levels during development.

In addition, there is data that shows a significant difference in performance levels of elite female athletes (Olympic athletes) in the highest and lowest free Test reference ranges for women. This correlation was not observed for males sorted by quartile.

This has a number of implications, and one of them suggests that if a male transitions to a female and stays on suppressive therapy they will still likely retain an advantage of some kind.

As for the NCAA ruling, they are a fundamentally political body. I am not suggesting that they made a ruling subject to foul play, but like most regulatory bodies they aren’t keen on science. Consider them more like Athletic Directors in a university than anything else. Administrative, marketing, and political functions.

Prefer not to say how, but I have some direct insight into how athletic departments and NCAA athletic department dieticians work. Frankly I do not expect any sound scientific reasonings from a regulatory body that still considers glutamine and BCAAs to be impermissible substances for their athletes, and up until this year limited the amount of protein than any meal given by the university athletic department could contain (i.e. you weren’t allowed to give an athlete pure protein powder). These are archaic, non-scientific rules that are outdated and not well thought out
or thought out at all.

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103

That’s true. But isn’t the same thing true about cis-female competitors–that there’s no way to know if they’re cheating without closely monitoring their hormone profile?

I agree it would be physically easier for a TG athlete to ‘dope.’ But I don’t think that means they are more likely to do it.

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You would think a cross-dresser would at least not go for the “can-I-speak-to-your-manager” haircut. Jeez.

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You’ve apparently never really been involved in competitive sports. People routinely cheat in Little League baseball.

Of course people will game this. And more power to them. Destroy the system due to its inherent stupidity.

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There’s a part of me that thinks Hubbard started this as a weird attempt at real life satire and is now just a dog that caught the tire, shocked that people actually let him do this.

As an aside, how does the 90+ and 90- weightclass division work in the olympics considering that the highest women’s class at the olympics is 75?

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If I’m not mistaken the weight classes go up to 90+.

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FWIW, she posted this a few weeks ago:
“Approximately 4.5 months between photos. On the left 250ish pounds in early October 2016 and on the right 230ish pounds a couple days ago. I’m happy with how things are progressing as I’m slowly but steadily getting leaner while maintaining my size.”

1154×1150 1.59 MB

She also underwent vocal feminization surgery about 2 months ago (to make her voice slightly higher) and has scheduled facial feminization surgery.

I’m thinking she either changed her mind about the endurance racing she spoke about in our interview or is just having much more trouble dropping weight than expected. She still deadlifts 600, squats 700, and benches 400. And she still does Kroc rows.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPtSGfgjrRk/?taken-by=janaemariekroc
“210x10 without straps. A far cry from my PR 300x13 but after 18 months on estrogen I’ll take it.”

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They do except there is no 90 at the Olympics, specifically. Just wondering how this gets handled in competition.

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I see a couple of retired Division I coaches every morning at the gym and we were talking about this topic. They both have years of experience training female athletes. I told them about the Hubbard controversy, and they asked me if I remembered Renee Richards. I didn’t. Before my time. This was the mid 1970s, TG MTF tennis star. She won a lawsuit that allowed her to compete as a MTF TG athlete. Like Hubbard, she was much older than the competitive age for female players, able to compete with the best women in the world from age 43-47. I believe she was in the top 5 women in the world at that age.

Interestingly, Richards later came to believe that she in fact had an unfair advantage, having spent over 30 years with male physiology. She said she regretted her decision to compete in that respect.

She disagrees with the United States Olympic Committee’s 2004 ruling that transsexuals be permitted to compete once they’ve completed two years of postoperative hormone therapy; she will forcefully argue against her former self, and imagines that if she were 20 years younger when she turned to professional tennis, she could have dominated the tour.

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111

I remember her (and the associated Sturm und Drang) quite well.

As an aside likely of interest only to me, she was an ophthalmologist.

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112

It’s a new IWF weight class. The Olympics will have it.

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I wanted to pop back in here and clarify a few of my positions.

I’m not against any lifestyle that doesn’t affect me. I really don’t care what fires your engine up, unless it somehow involves pissing in my coffee. I like freaks who can be freaks without shoving it down everyone else’s throat. I am in no way opposed to the idea of studying the human condition of transgender behaviors further, and I certainly don’t see anything wrong with using science to understand each other better.

I’ve probably been a bit more crass and dry than I usually am in this thread, and I suppose that’s me lashing out against the notion that transgender people don’t simply deserve our respect, but our deference. It doesn’t take a doctorate in Transgender Physiological Hormonology Studies to raise an eyebrow at Hubbard’s victory. That naturally leads us to the policies that allowed for this outcome.

Perhaps the anecdotes will assemble themselves into data. Perhaps we’ll see a wellspring of competitive fairness as more and more women begin taking the field wearing jockstraps. Time will tell.

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114

Ha! For sure. I don’t know what the rules are in other states. In CA you cannot drug test high school athletes. Of course, lots of them are using PEDs. You get a high school track athlete recruited to a Division I school like UCLA where they have to submit to drug testing. Suddenly they are no longer able to match their high school times.

I think this is the position of nearly everybody familiar with strength training.

In his early 20’s (as a professional jockey), my brother at a BW of 115 lbs had a newbie bench of 200 pounds after a few weeks. My newbie bench at a BW of 112 pounds was 90 pounds, after a couple of months I believe. Pretty good for a newbie female at that weight. After 5-6 years of training I had a 135 lb bench. We’re both built like gymnasts and people often thought we were twins. I don’t think anyone here imagines that his newbie bench press would drop to 90 pounds after a year of female hormones.

Are there women at that BW with a 200 pound bench? Yes, but they are the best in the world. Are there 112 pound men who can’t bench 90 pounds? Yes. I didn’t look up the bench record for men in that weight class, but this is the kind of logic that gets used when they talk about overlap between men and women, or accepting a level or arbitrariness in sports. Yes there’s overlap, but not so when you’re looking at M and F competitors, otherwise, there would be no rational for F athletics.

Agree. I don’t think anybody here really believes that I wouldn’t be stronger now if I’d had 30+ years on male hormones.

As a society, we’re trying to right the wrongs of discrimination against LGBT individuals, and right now if a few female athletes get stepped on in the process, that seems a small price to pay for the activists and progressives. TG individuals do not want to be separate or different in any way. That always gets talked about like it’s Jim Crow.

Many TG individuals can compete in group athletics and never raise any eyebrows. Maybe they aren’t a very athletic person anyway. I don’t see how they can make these rules fair to those people. You’d might need different rules for different sports. Competitive strength sports are going to be an area where it really shows. Increased upper body strength in males is not a social construct. Hubbard, a mediocre athlete, is now one of the best female lifters in the world.

Both of the coaches I talked to this morning see it as a female issue. As in, female athletes would need to band together and speak out, or refuse to compete with MTF athletes, at least in some sports. They said that any professional athlete would not want to do that because they’d lose their sponsors / endorsements if they got branded as somehow anti-LGBT. The same for college athletes and coaches, where there would be protests. The schools would not want the press. I don’t expect this to change unless all the female records begin to be held by MTF athletes.

What a strange time for female sports. I feel really bad for the record holders who got displaced by Hubbard, and for the other women who have trained so hard to be beaten by someone who had the advantages of male hormones for over 30 years.

I saw some TG people talking about it online. Mixed. Some supportive, but a lot of them feel like Hubbard competing is unfair, think MTF individuals should not compete in sports like WLing, think it’s doing damage to their cause. Sad. I would bet Hubbard is a pretty unhappy person right now. Some of the negative reaction to this is very mean.

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115

Some of the female tennis players at the time were especially put off because Richards had the benefit of male tennis clubs and coaches, largely unavailable to women at that time.

“There was such a great disparity in athletics between women and men pre-Title IX,” says Trish Bostrom, who sued the University of Washington in 1972, seeking the establishment of a women’s tennis team and the right to try out for the men’s team until that happened. “She had all those advantages as a boy. I would have died to play on a high school tennis team. Those were things that, as a man, she was able to take advantage of. It’s not the person — it’s more the great disparity of opportunities.”

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Really? I can’t find anything to that effect anywhere.

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I continue to find this topic fascinating
 or at least more interesting than reading about Trumpcare fails right now.

For anyone who is still thinking about this.

Not related to Olympic weight classes, but you might find this interesting, @Silyak .

I was curious about T levels in TG MTF athletes, as compared to natal females. Yeah, there’s tremendous debate about it from sports scientists and endocrinologists. Some of the rational comes from talk about what is “medically achievable” in terms of suppression of T in a TG person.

The new cap would be closer to the 3 nmol/L, which is the upper range for most natal females. Ten is on the lower end for natal males.

“I want a number that is fair and medically achievable,” said Dr. Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist who treats transgender patients at Boston Medical Center and who spoke to the IOC medical commission at a meeting in May. “We don’t want to create a rule that people can’t meet.”

Safer agrees that 10 is too high. He says 4 might be a number that is fair for all women, and a number that transgender athletes could sustain. Suppressing testosterone in transgender women (who have not had surgery to remove their gonads) so that their levels stay below 3 might be difficult.
_

This is fairly long, but gets into the science/ physiology of the debate. Really worth the read if you’re trying to understand that part.

http://sportsscientists.com/2016/05/hyperandrogenism-women-vs-women-vs-men-sport-qa-joanna-harper/

This is also interesting as relates to intersex athletes. The mandate that they bring their T levels down to 10 nmol/l if they want to compete has been removed, and the running blogs have been alive with lots of debate, particularly because one’s intersex status, or TG status for that matter, is supposed to remain confidential. Athletes like Semenya had her running speeds increase dramatically after she no longer had to suppress her T.

Another informative article about intersex athletes.
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2016-08-11/who-gets-be-woman-olympics

Edited to add: Nobody seems to be talking about hormone history in any of this. In fact, many of the arguments for allowing MTF athletes to compete as females are the same arguments that one could use to say we don’t need female sports at all because there is “significant overlap.”

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118

I’m in no way an expert on any of the waves of feminism, nor have I studied up on the proper words to use to convey the thoughts I’m about to share.

Simply stated, I see this as a women’s issue.

Transgenders do not threaten male sports at all. Women can take all of the drugs they want, get all of the surgeries under the sun and declare themselves the most macho of men ever to swing their dicks around. Have at it. None of them will deadlift more than Eddie Hall. None of them will come close. Maybe a few will deadlift more than I have, and I’m just a 37 year-old desk jockey who’s played around with barbells for a few years.

Of course, not all sports are like deadlifting. There’s probably a few sports which women are better-suited to that I’m overlooking, or where physical strength is less of a factor. I realize these exist, but let’s face it. Noboby’s going to get all bent out of shape if a FTM transgender starts dominating ping pong, equestrian events, or yachting. That would probably get a few shrugs and some pretty sincere congratulations, but I don’t think many men would play the “unfair” card in those situations.

What if a FTM transgender knocks Tom Brady out of his starting job? What about something else on that level of achievement? THAT would be a true landmark event in sports for reasons that seem obvious to me, but apparently get a little murky once you start studying the finer details of the transgender phenomenon. Again, nobody’s crying “unfair” if that happens. I think most people would watch in amazement. I certainly would.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Hubbard has cleared all of the most scientifically objective hurdles that could be put in front of him. His victory is legitimate in the eyes of his enlightened federation. He’s now the best female lifter in New Zealand at age 39, long after his physical prime has passed during a mediocre career as a male lifter.

I’m sorry, but there is no amount of research that can be done which will convince the average person to view that last scenario in a positive light. Keeping this in mind, I cannot see how outcomes like this will benefit anyone at all. I can see it hurting an awful lot of women, just like the ladies who were robbed of their chance to compete at a higher level by Hubbard’s completely above-board actions. I can see it hurting a lot of transgenders too, as outcomes like this will not shape public opinion positively.

I can’t come up with many people who are helped by outcomes like this.

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All I can say is : Girl Power?!?!

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From @anon71262119’s second link, a quote by the expert being interviewed:

"I don’t think that either of the “extreme” points of view are totally unreasonable if one understands the individuals who believe them.

If one believes that women’s sports are vitally important, and one has little regard for the rights of a small segment of humanity, then suggesting that women’s sport should only be for those who are 100% female is not unreasonable.

On the other hand, if one is passionate about the rights of marginalized minorities such as intersex or transgender women, and one is not as invested in the benefits of sport to all women, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that anyone who considers herself female should be allowed to compete as nature made her.

Since I believe in both the vital importance of women’s sport and the rights of intersex and transgender women, then I am forced to consider a compromise position, one virtually identical to that espoused by the IAAF and the IOC.

Both of the “extreme” arguments are simple to explain and defend, often passionately. It is much harder to inspire passion over a compromise position that is painstakingly put together by a committee of divergent views. But this compromise position has been embraced by many people who value well-reasoned logic."

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It seems that they are also predicated upon the notion that gender is a social construct, and sex is a biological one- but an athlete or two want to claim gender difference to participate in a biologically segregated field.

To me that is the crux of the issue. If you want to claim gender- then by all means whistle Shania Twain all day long.

But your plumbing is your plumbing. It really is a binary issue, and this desire to blur the line has even managed to encroach upon at least one legitimately female born woman- Caster Semenaya.

Real women should seriously consider boycotting events in which they have to compete against men.

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