When the LPGA and U.S. Golf Association announced a new policy that effectively bans transgender women, they said they were doing so on the advice of medical experts as well as research that shows going through male puberty would give transgender women a competitive advantage in golf.
Yet neither organization would provide details on the experts or the science, and two researchers who specialize in studies of transgender athletes said there has been no such study involving golfers. Nor, several researchers say, is there any reliable study showing that transgender women have a clear competitive advantage.
“There’s nothing we can see in the reviewed literature, nothing reliable that would suggest there‘s an unfair advantage so far,” said Debra Kriger, who as a research associate at E-Alliance was part of the team that reviewed available data and literature on the participation of transgender women in sport for the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport.
In fact, most studies used to claim transgender women have competitive advantages in sports are based on the performances of cisgender men, which is not an appropriate comparison. Or compare the performance of transgender women athletes with that of cisgender women who are “sedentary,” or not athletes. Also not an appropriate comparison.
One of the few studies that did compare transgender women athletes with cisgender women athletes found transgender women had lower lung capacity and cardiovascular function, possibly putting them at a disadvantage.
“Transgender women, athletes in particular, are very, very different from cisgender male athletes,” said Blair Hamilton, one of the researchers on the study, which was published in April in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
“That’s one of the big takeaways we found from the research we did. They need to be studied as their own, unique cohort.”
The problem is there aren’t enough transgender athletes to do robust, long-term studies. And bans like those by the LPGA and USGA will only make it harder to do the research that will allow participation decisions to be made on facts and data rather than fear and demonization.
“There’s not that much data there,” D.J. Oberlin, an assistant professor and exercise physiologist at Lehman College who last year published a paper reviewing the available science on transgender participation in sports.
Said Hamilton, who is a research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University, “The more these policies shut us down, the less chance there is to actually find the correct answer to this.”
The transgender population is minuscule, just 0.6 percent of Americans 13 and older, according to a 2022 study by the Williams Institute, a UCLA Law think tank. And contrary to what some politicians and right-wing influencers would have you believe, the number of transgender athletes is even lower.
NCAA president Charlie Baker said last week there are “less than 10” transgender athletes out of 510,000 collegiate athletes. There has been one openly transgender woman at the Olympics, despite their participation being allowed since 2004. There are no openly transgender women in the WNBA, NWSL, LPGA or WTA.
But transgender people, athletes in particular, are increasingly the target of the right wing, with widespread ignorance and bad faith arguments often being used to marginalize them.
Transgender women athletes are characterized by opponents as men, when research shows they are not. Even before hormone therapy, transgender women have lower lean body mass and strength, according to that Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport report, published in 2022. Those appear to be further reduced with hormone therapy, said Kriger, now assistant manager of Co-curricular, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education.
Said Hamilton, “A lot of people who want to push bans look at transgender women (and say), `They have bigger skeletons, so they have more muscle mass.’ If you look at transgender women athletes, they’re actually weaker than cisgender athletes. They actually have less muscle mass to power.”
The effect of prior exposure to testosterone in transgender women is often presumed, too, equated with the effects of doping, according to the CCES report. But that, it said, is a “false biological equivalency.” Or the performances by cisgender men are used as predictors for transgender women.
“Many of the claims about the benefits of testosterone in athletics have gone unchecked since they are often taken for granted in biological research papers and do not include citations,” the CCES report said.
When the International Women’s Forum, a conservative group hostile to transgender women, sent a letter to Tour officials in August signed by 275 current and former players, it cited performance statistics of cisgender men to argue cisgender women would be at a disadvantage against transgender women.
Neither the LPGA nor USGA would say if that letter was used in crafting the new gender policy, announced earlier this month. The LPGA said it consulted “experts across diverse fields, including medicine, science, sports physiology, golf performance and gender policy law, alongside feedback from a broad array of stakeholders.” The USGA said it had “consulted with a range of experts in transgender medicine and sports science” and was “confident that we received the benefit of objective, scientific research from independent, unbiased experts.”
But Hamilton and Oberlin said there is no study that has compared the performance of transgender women golfers who’ve done gender affirming hormone therapy with cisgender women golfers. With the LPGA and USGA refusing to provide evidence to the contrary, the only conclusion can be that the assumptions they are making about transgender women are just that: Assumptions.
“I suspect that they did consult people,” Oberlin said. “I don’t know how thoroughly they looked across everybody or if they just went to one or two people who were probably going to agree with them.”
Kriger said one of the things that jumped out to the research team behind the CCES report was the lack of clarity in what gives any athlete a performance advantage. Is it hormones? Is it height? Is it limb length?
There’s simply no way to make sweeping generalizations, Kriger said. Not from a factual basis, anyway.
“It’s such a mystery as to what makes performance peak,” she said. “To link that back to specific biomarkers, it seems from the review, is a bit of a doomed project. There hasn’t been something yet that’s popped up that this is the biomarker that can distinguish gender or can distinguish performance.
“It seems,” she added, “it would be likely it would be more of a mix.”
The bans on transgender athletes are an extension of what has long been a policing of women’s bodies and attempts to keep women out of sports. Women were banned from running the Boston Marathon until 1972 because they were not believed to be “physiologically capable.” Women ski jumpers were not allowed at the Olympics until 2014 for fear their uteruses would fall out. Women were forced to undergo genital checks in the 1960s, with one humiliating method dubbed “the nude parade” because it required athletes to walk past doctors without underwear on. This was eventually replaced by genetic screening.
Only after scientific evidence to the contrary, and doses of common sense, were these ridiculous ideas abandoned. Who’s to say bans of transgender athletes won’t be looked at the same way in the future?
But without more studies, preferably sport-specific research, no one will be able to say for sure. Until then, Hamilton and the other authors of the BJSM study cautioned sports organizations against imposing bans and excluding transgender athletes.
“If you’re so confident about your position, why not just let us do our work?” Hamilton said. “Let transgender athletes compete right now, let us test them. If we find out there is an advantage, we’ll report that.”
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
