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Transgender Athletes

81 watchers

Dowse Oct 2019 4:40pm, 20 Oct 2019 300 posts	0 Dowse Rachel McKinnon winning and setting a world best in sprint cycling: bbc.co.uk
Grast_girl Oct 2019 6:02pm, 20 Oct 2019 762 posts	0 Grast_girl Thanks for the links jda and paul, not sure why I couldn't find it. I've just read through it. It's a smallish group, so the only outcome it is sufficiently powered to detect is the Time To Exhaustion (TTE) outcome, which does appear to be both statistically significant and likely to show a performance improvement in line with the IAAF ruling for 400, 800 and 1500m. In theory, they should have done a correction for all the other outcomes for multiple statistical tests, which they haven't done (claiming they're exploratory). I'd have liked to have seen the graph showing the correlation between T and TEE. It seems the T levels they've reached in most cases were within the new 5 nmol/L limit, so the new limit may be ineffective in "levelling the playing field". I would advocate more research to work out what a reasonable limit should be, as 5 nmol/L seems quite arbitrary. The mechanism by which T helps is still elusive, as it appears it's not increased VO2 max.
CreatureOfTheHill 14 Apr 3:34pm, 14 Apr 2020 123 posts	0 CreatureOfTheHill First up - We are going to be outspoken here. If you are likely to find that difficult, we suggest you move on. A search on Fetcheveryone for Transgender defaults to threads and throws this up. As a transgender person struggling to get back to exercise, we did that, read the last couple if pages and despaired. Jumping to page one, and it was started in good spirit, but even there it degenerated by post 5. We were not going to read the whole thread. We gave up disheartened. It's been bugging us since. So now we have more spoons, we will point out why. Many transgender people will feel uncomfortable around exercise for a variety of reasons, and we will explain ours, but we are not representative of all. Framing conversations about transgender athletes based on competitive athletes is as relevant to the vast majority of transgender athletes as it to cisgender athletes. That is to say, not in the slightest bit. So while you discuss hormone levels, performance advantages and other physical aspects at the sharp end, you paint transgender people as cheats like those that dope. People are people, good, bad and indifferent. That applies regardless of gender, sexuality, ethnicity or anything else. By looking at the competitive people. You are going to find transgender people to take advantage. Why, because they are competitive. They will be making stupid decisions to gain an advantage. So do those cisgender athletes that look to bend rules or outright cheat. It is an environment that encourages it. You want to call people out for being #@$%s, be our guest. We will join you. But consider where you are doing it and what negative effects you might be having by putting it under the transgender banner. You are actually examining competitive behaviors. We have a physical advantage we guess in some ways by being born male. But you know what, we have been beaten in many arenas by people of all genders. We had no desire in the past when we raced as male to beat anyone, and we don't now. So actually, all this crap on the thread just makes us feel like if we were to actually return to running an event, the default position would be that we were trying to cheat someone out of a place. Way to encourage inclusion. Really, our personal struggle is with how to exercise without the emotional/psychological trauma being triggered. We can say #$@% anyone, we looked like a bit of a freak before. But actually, we have to think of our children and the abuse they might suffer. On top of that, we suffer from dysmorphia that can be very traumatic. We have some coping mechanisms. While we can disassociate from the physical body, it is not too bad. However, activities like running can be real triggers and working out even the basics of what to wear to minimise that held us back from exercising until we figured it out. We cannot even contemplate swimming now, that is denied to us for the time being. As for the concern about the long term effect of hormones which page 1 rapidly degenerated into. Two things: One, we are pretty sure that our problems with addiction, and period where we used food for comfort and spent obese were pretty harmful. Damn, we have no idea what underlying damage we did. We have nearly ended our life more than once. So in relative terms, hormone treatment is pretty low risk. Harm reduction. We have done the research. Two, for anyone thinking that it is appropriate to police other people's bodies on the basis of some personal concern. Really, you can #$@% right off. We are as capable of making decisions about our own health and bodies as anyone else. You're going to get the same response if you tell us we cannot ride a motorcycle or climb because there is a risk of us coming to harm. Guess we were too thick to figure that out and make our own risk assessment. What we see here is a thread about cisgender athletes, and the impact on them. So we are going to start another thread in the hope that if someone else searches for transgender, they find something a bit more relevant to supporting them.
mascott514 14 Apr 3:48pm, 14 Apr 2020 379 posts	0 mascott514 Creature of the Hill, I feel your anger, and I think its a good thing that you plan to start a new thread, where you can shape the way you look at your running. For what its worth, I recall this thread, and found some of it to be the most unpleasant forum posts I have come across on Fetch. Having said that, Fetch is a great place, and its helped me no end, and I'm sure others will wish to show support for all transgender athletes, from the top, to the joggers down where I am! All the best - done be angry!
DocM 14 Apr 4:45pm, 14 Apr 2020 33685 posts	0 DocM i agree that this thread took some very nasty turns at times. But it did also make some of us stop and think about issues we had not considered before. I think i am not alone in saying it made some of us make an effort to become better informed and a lot more sympathetic. I would welcome a much more supportive thread on transgender issues.
McGoohan 14 Apr 4:46pm, 14 Apr 2020 44608 posts	0 McGoohan That thread now exists and is here: fetcheveryone.com/forum/transgender-exercise---lets-fetch-everyone-61358/
Flatlander 14 Apr 5:05pm, 14 Apr 2020 1669 posts	0 Flatlander I concur with DocM. Despite the very polarised views, there were some very supportive comments and genuine attempts to gain better information and understanding, so I hope those people will contribute to your new thread.
westmoors 14 Apr 5:57pm, 14 Apr 2020 3897 posts	0 westmoors Agree with DocM and Flatlander. Thanks for posting the link McGoo. I will wander over and take a look. I am interested in gaining better knowledge and becoming more supportive.
LindsD 14 Apr 6:55pm, 14 Apr 2020 35203 posts	0 LindsD I agree and am grateful for the new thread.
The_Saint 29 May 12:22pm, 29 May 2020 6507 posts	0 The_Saint Guardian article about the Connecticut High School issue theguardian.com