this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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What makes you think decreasing one's estrogen intake would be beneficial for sports performance? You're likely thinking of antiandrogens, which block testosterone.
I'd still question whether that's a choice a transwoman would actually make - I assume that to get an advantage from extra testosterone, it has to be around for a significant while while you're training (for greater muscle mass increase). Female bodybuilders accused of using anabolic steroids rarely just hit them the night before the competition, right?
Ah right, the T blockers. For some reason I'd forgotten those and thought they just have to take estrogen and that itself balances out the testosterone. I'm not super versed in the technical details, I'm not trans myself.
There's advantage to gain both short term and long term. Long term is better results from training, but in any sort of sport where your physical capabilities right then and there matter, testosterone will also give you a boost. Bodybuilding actually is different in that the competition itself isn't very physical, only the training is.
But even for long term: One could just halve her dosage all year round if there are no set testosterone limit specifically set for trans women or something like that. AND it would be incredibly complicated to set such a limit without pissing a bunch of people off.
It's just a shitty situation we find ourselves in, sports are supposed to be all about integrity, but as humans are assholes, there would almost certainly be the occasional person trying to use this to cheat. Obviously not in the quantities conservatives would have you believe.
I... do not know what a good solution is though, personally I wouldn't want anyone blanket banned from their favourite sport for their identity any more than I'd like to see people banned from playing a musical instrument or something else like that, but we're specifically talking about something that's meant to be competitive, and we're specifically talking about women's leagues that have to exist only because testosterone is such a ridiculous advantage that women in most sports just can't compete with men. In a fair world, women would be as strong and as fast as men naturally and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
And even if T levels in trans women were regulated for fairness... WHO decides what the fair T level is? If you set it below top cis women, trans women will never stand a chance. Set it too high and it goes the other way, still not a completely level playing field.
Do you have a source, especially for the claim about short term benefits?
I'm no expert, nor am I trans - the best I got is some amount of scientific literacy and access to Wikipedia. The point I was trying to get at, however, is that long-term exposure to higher testosterone levels likely has some unfortunate side effects like developing male secondary gender characteristics - and some of those are permanent (at least for youths, not sure about post-pubertal adults). Not the kind of sacrifice I would make after having to fight for years just to get on hormones.
And if it is indeed the case that testosterone has such short-term benefits as you say, wouldn't we expect cis-women athletes (and indeed, athletes of any gender-category) to also abuse it? That's just the same old problem of doping, and so I believe that's up to the sports' associations to sort out.
I also want to push back on an impression that seems to be forming here, that testosterone is directly linked to success in sports - I don't think that's the case.
So, the long-term effect of testosterone for athletic performance is that you can train harder, recover faster, and get more benefit even from the same amount of training. That's why bodybuilders on steroids often work out every day or even twice a day.
The short-term effects are to do with explosive performance, reduced fatigue, and just being more aggressive/competitive, which can be a good thing in certain scenarios. Coming from a family of athletes but not being athletic myself, while still having a fairly high level of testosterone (at least in my earlier years before I got overweight), I've been known to keep up with people in much better shape than myself purely because of competitive drive, achieving results I could never dream of without competition. Now, everyone has that, women too, but it's amplified by testosterone, at least according to some studies - and women get a larger boost to competitiveness from a testosterone supplement, according to at least one paper I found - this is likely because men are less sensitive to slight testosterone increases (we have higher baselines after all).
And they absolutely do! It's easier to check though, because you'd find compounds they're not supposed to have at all, since synthetic testosterone is chemically different from natural and you'd have specific metabolites in your blood. The remaining question, I guess, is can we test that trans women are getting the correct amount of testosterone blockers, and what the correct amount is. If that's testable easily enough, then this whole thing might be an easily solved problem.
That goes without saying IMO. These rules should always be on the level of individual leagues and associations, not mandated by government. The latter option would be stupid as fuck because there are so many variables and there are even sports where men hold no advantage anyway.
Then what is the advantage men hold over women, that they lose when they transition, to be allowed into women's leagues? Because men being inherently advantaged in most sports is not a made up piece of information, it's present both where you'd expect (100m sprint, weightlifting) and in some cases where you'd expect a smaller difference (marathon running - something where big muscles and a large frame actually work against you). It's the reason we have women's leagues in the first place, otherwise we could just have one league for everyone.
I agree that testosterone alone is not the whole answer to athletic performance, there are many, many other factors, but it definitely seems to help perform. It's one of those things where a population with higher testosterone would perform better on average, but on an individual level you can't really judge purely by that.