As many of you are aware, this entire topic is near and dear to me as I’ve been personally targeted and sexually assaulted—subjected to transphobic violence. It does not matter that I’m a cisgender woman—and that is why I’ve maintained that transphobia is a danger to us all whether you, yourself, know it or not.
Because I’ve spent years actively learning and questioning and—most importantly—listening, you will see that my lengthy writing below is much different from many politicians. I am horrified anytime Republican or Democratic politicians use the relatively minuscule transgender American population to score political points. In Texas Congressional District 2 there have been numerous transgender children and their families targeted and harmed by transphobic violence as a result of the opportunistic rhetoric of irresponsible politicians cosplaying leadership.
Not on my watch. Out of respect for me, please read this in full.
A Fact-Based, Harm-Minimizing Approach to Athlete Inclusion Policy
Where I Stand:
This issue is too often presented as a forced choice between protecting women’s sports and protecting transgender people. That framing is false, and it’s costing us the ability to have an honest conversation. I believe we can build policy grounded in the actual state of the science—including its real uncertainties—without dehumanizing transgender athletes, athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), or the cisgender women raising good-faith fairness concerns.
Gatekeeping who “looks like” a woman has never protected women. It has subjected women—including cisgender women, including tall women, including women who simply don’t fit a narrow visual template—to public scrutiny, humiliation, and in some cases violence. Any policy response to this issue has to reckon with that history, not repeat it.
What the Evidence Currently Supports—
– **Hormone therapy produces real, measurable physiological change** in transgender women—reductions in muscle mass, strength, and hemoglobin over time. This is well established.[^1][^2]
– **Natural biological variation among women competing in elite sport has always been wide.** Athletes with DSD are the clearest example: some have naturally elevated testosterone, and the science on whether—and how—that translates into competitive advantage is genuinely contested among researchers, not settled in either direction.[^3][^4][^5]
– **The advantage question is sport-specific.** Any advantage tied to testosterone and puberty is concentrated in strength, power, and speed sports.[^6] Applying one blanket national rule across all sports—precision sports, skill sports, endurance sports, contact sports—is not supported by the data we have.
– **Age and level matter.** Physical advantages tied to puberty are minimal before puberty and most consequential at the elite level.[^6] Rules built for Olympic competition are not automatically appropriate for youth or recreational sport, and shouldn’t be applied as if they were.
– **No researcher, on any “side” of this debate, has identified a reliable individual biomarker that predicts competitive advantage.**[^7] Policy today is necessarily built on population-level averages applied to individuals—an acknowledged limitation, not a hidden one.
– **Natural variation is not restricted or scrutinized the same way in men’s sport.** Nearly 17% of elite male athletes measured in one study had testosterone below the typical male range, and extreme genetic outliers (unusually efficient lactic acid clearance, elevated oxygen-carrying capacity) are celebrated rather than restricted.[^8]
What We Don’t Yet Know—
Honest policy requires naming this plainly:
– Whether hormone therapy fully closes performance gaps **at the elite level**, in **specific power/strength sports**, over **specific durations** of treatment. The best current research (a 2026 pooled analysis of 52 studies in the *British Journal of Sports Medicine*) found no significant fitness differences after 1–3 years of hormone therapy, but had very few elite athletes and few sport-specific performance measures.[^1][^9] An earlier study found trans women retained an advantage at one year of treatment.[^10]
– Whether effects of male puberty that predate transition (skeletal structure, cardiovascular capacity) persist after hormone therapy through mechanisms like muscle memory or epigenetic change. This is an active, unresolved scientific question—argued forcefully in recent literature, but not proven either way.[^6]
– Whether naturally elevated testosterone in DSD athletes functions the same way pharmacological testosterone does, particularly in cases where androgen receptors are non-functional—some research suggests genetic factors unrelated to functional testosterone may explain elite DSD athletes’ physical traits.[^3][^4]
– How to control for confounding variables—training history, baseline fitness, self-selection into research studies—that limit confidence in current pooled analyses on all sides of this debate.[^9][^11]
These are not gaps invented to stall policy. They reflect small elite-athlete populations, the difficulty of prospective longitudinal research, and a field that is actively evolving. Confident claims of certainty—from any direction—currently outrun the sample sizes available.
Policy Principles—
1. **Differentiate by sport type.** Rules should reflect where the evidence actually points — strength/power sports require different scrutiny than skill or precision sports.
2. **Differentiate by level and age.** Elite competition and youth/recreational sport are different evidentiary and ethical contexts and should not share a single rule.[^6]
3. **Use explicit, revisable evidentiary thresholds**—not blanket bans, and not blanket inclusion asserted as beyond question. If a threshold is used, it should be stated, sourced, and open to revision as research develops.
4. **Reject visual, behavioral, or “eye test” gatekeeping entirely.** These approaches have never reliably identified anything about athletic advantage and have caused documented, serious harm to cisgender women—particularly tall women and women who don’t conform to narrow expectations of femininity, including athletes like Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand who were publicly scrutinized over their bodies.[^12][^13]
5. **Commit, in the policy language itself, to revisiting these rules** as research on hormone durability, muscle memory, and DSD mechanisms develops.
The Political Weaponization Problem—
Separate from the scientific question is a political one, and it deserves to be named directly: this issue is frequently used by politicians not to build workable policy, but to delegitimize transgender people’s existence entirely. That is a distinct act from debating eligibility criteria, and it carries real danger—both to transgender people, who face disproportionate rates of violence, and to the broader public, because it normalizes a culture of bodily interrogation that does not stay contained to its stated target.
“Transvestigating”—the practice of publicly scrutinizing an individual’s body, voice, or appearance to adjudicate their sex—has already been turned against cisgender women, especially tall women, muscular women, and women who don’t perform femininity in expected ways. When public discourse trains people to treat womanhood as something to be visually or physically verified, it does not protect women. It puts all women, including cisgender women who have no connection to this policy debate, at risk of harassment, public humiliation, and physical violence carried out by people who’ve appointed themselves gatekeepers of who “counts.”
A fact-based policy discussion is only possible if we separate two different things: legitimate eligibility criteria debated on evidence, and political rhetoric that treats transgender people as a threat to be eliminated from public life rather than a population to be fairly governed. Policy can and should hold space for real uncertainty in the science. It should hold zero space for language or strategy that dehumanizes any group in the process.
What This Is Not—
This is not a both-sides retreat from having a position. It is a position: build rules that are as precise as the evidence allows, revise them as the evidence improves, and refuse to let anyone—transgender athletes, DSD athletes, or cisgender women—be treated as a problem to be solved, a body to be inspected, or a political weapon to be wielded, rather than a person to be protected.
—
Sources
[^1]: Sieczkowska, S.M., et al. “Body composition and physical fitness in transgender versus cisgender individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis.” *British Journal of Sports Medicine* (2026). DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2025-110239. Summary: BMJ Group, “Physical fitness of transgender and cisgender women is comparable, current evidence suggests,” https://bmjgroup.com/physical-fitness-of-transgender-and…/
[^2]: Yahoo Sports, “No, trans women don’t have inherent advantage over cis women in sports: new study,” https://sports.yahoo.com/…/no-trans-women-dont-inherent…
[^3]: Bermon, S., et al. “Natural Selection for Genetic Variants in Sport: The Role of Y Chromosome Genes in Elite Female Athletes with 46,XY DSD.” *Sports Medicine* (2014). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-014-0249-8
[^4]: UK Parliament POST, “Performance, Inclusion and Elite Sports – Athletes with Differences in Sex Development,” https://post.parliament.uk/research-briefings/post-pn-0682/
[^5]: World Athletics, “IAAF introduces new eligibility regulations for female classification,” https://worldathletics.org/…/eligibility-regulations…
[^6]: Handelsman, D.J. “Biology and Management of Male-Bodied Athletes in Elite Female Sports.” *Drug Testing and Analysis* (2025). https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com…
[^7]: University of Washington Department of Medicine, “Sex hormones and athletes,” https://mednews.uw.edu/news/sex-hormones-athletes
[^8]: Scientific American, “Hormone Levels Are Being Used to Discriminate against Female Athletes,” https://www.scientificamerican.com/…/hormone-levels…/; PopSci, “The complicated truth about testosterone’s effect on athletic performance,” https://www.popsci.com/…/testosterone-effect-athletic…/
[^9]: Science Media Centre (Spain), expert reaction to Sieczkowska et al., https://sciencemediacentre.es/…/review-finds-no…; Science Media Centre (UK), expert reaction, https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to…/
[^10]: NBC News, “Trans women retain athletic edge after a year of hormone therapy, study finds,” https://www.nbcnews.com/…/trans-women-retain-athletic… (study by Roberts, T., et al., *British Journal of Sports Medicine*)
[^11]: “Challenging the principle of ‘No presumption of advantage’ with a focus on testosterone and gender eligibility in sports,” PMC, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12835371/
[^12]: JCI, “Controversies surrounding female athletes with differences in sexual development,” https://www.jci.org/articles/view/138479
[^13]: Biointeractive/HHMI, “Testosterone Levels in Athletes,” educator data point (Dutee Chand case), https://www.biointeractive.org/…/TestosteroneAthletes…