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Gavin Newsom says he supports trans equality in everything but sports - LGBTQ Nation
(www.lgbtqnation.com)
but why? the evidence is not in his favor, trans folks on HRT on average perform the same as cis folks of the same gender:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2026/01/22/bjsports-2025-110239
While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable.
transgender women’s VO₂ max, when adjusted for weight, aligns with cisgender women,4 further supporting parity in endurance capabilities
the absence of strength disparities between transgender women and cisgender women found in the current review was consistent and contradicts narratives framing male puberty as conferring irreversible athletic advantages despite GAHT.
transgender women’s pretherapy advantages in push-ups and sit-ups disappeared after 2 years of feminising hormones among 46 individuals who started GAHT while in the US Air Force.
I think the problem here is that we don't acknowledge how broad the variation is among cis populations - even if our intuition or the conventional wisdom is true that a trans woman who went through the wrong puberty will probably end up taller and thus more advantaged in some sports relative to a random cis woman you picked off the street ... but the problem is that cis female athletes are not random cis women, there is a selection bias towards the tallest, strongest, etc. women - so especially in that context the evidence does not point to trans women having an advantage over cis female athletes, which is what the evidence we have points to (i.e. the trans women who are athletes are not that competitive or successful in sports).
EDIT: oh, and I wanted to say, John Oliver did a decent job covering the trans sports controversy, it really needs to be said that trans participation in sports has been normal for decades without controversy or issue, the only reason it's coming up now is because the GOP and the anti-trans movement failed to get bathroom bans to pass (and after the anti-abortion movement killed Roe v Wade they needed a new issue to motivate their base), so they identified trans participation in sports as a better starting point for normalizing transphobic policies that aim to ultimately eliminate trans people from the public.
It is very telling that most trans athletic bans in the US target kids playing in K-12 school systems, and that most of the bans exclude trans men as well as trans women; the goal is not fairness in high-stakes athletic competitions (where regulations are already in place to ensure fairness), the goal is to punish and ostracize trans people and to normalize legislation that does so.