Harvard Crimson Claims It’s ‘Unclear’ If Men Have an Athletic Advantage over Women

The leftists at the Harvard Crimson have spoken out against transgender athlete bans and claimed that the evidence to support the case that men have a physical advantage over women is “less conclusive.”

However, in the process of making the assertion, the article ignored all evidence to the contrary to support their own claim that transgender athlete participation is wholly benign.

In the college paper’s April 16 editorial, entitled There Are Many Obstacles Facing Women’s Sports. Trans Athletes Aren’t One, The Crimson Editorial Board asserts that the “science” is “less conclusive” that “transgender women hold a biological edge over their cisgender opponents.”

The science-free citation of using the political term “cisgender” aside, the editorial board goes on to insist that “science” proves that men who take female hormones to “transition” lose their male strength.

“According to the National Institute of Health, testosterone levels of transgender women after 12 months of hormone therapy resemble those of their cisgender counterparts, while their muscle strength either decreases or remains unchanged after a year of treatment,” the board wrote.

The board then sallies forth as if that was all the evidence anyone has ever presented to show that “transgender women” are on an equal playing field with women. The editorial goes on to ignore any other study that might tend to show that the male body — testosterone level aside — has an inherent advantage over the female body in size, reach, lung capacity, and other metrics. It ignores these studies as if they never existed, dismissing them all with a curt “studies measuring athletic aptitude among trans individuals contradict each other, and many are limited by their small sample sizes and lack of comparative groups.”

But testosterone alone is far from the only difference between men and women where it affects sports, and many studies have found this out.

Emma N. Hilton and Tommy R. Lundberg, for instance, published a study in Sports Medicine that found, “current evidence shows the biological advantage, most notably in terms of muscle mass and strength, conferred by male puberty and thus enjoyed by most transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed as per current sporting guidelines for transgender athletes.”

The authors of that study go on to say that transgender “women” have between a 10 and 50 percent advantage over women in sports, regardless of testosterone levels.

A similar study by Timothy A Roberts, Joshua Smalley, and Dale Ahrendt, published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that men who transition to women maintain some of their physical advantages over women despite all the medical tomfoolery of their “transition.”

Yet another study finds that muscle strength, size, and composition are still stronger in transgender women for at least a year after gender-affirming treatment.

The Crimson wholly ignored all this as it presented its “science” in an editorial that the article insisted “represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board.”

The editorial goes on to dismiss the whole issue of the destruction of women’s sports at the hands of transgender women by insisting that there are too few trans athletes to even worry about.

The editorial board bloviates on, saying, “The strikingly minuscule number of total trans athletes, let alone trans women competing in collegiate athletics: Out of the more than 500,000 athletes that compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an estimated 4o are trans. That’s less than 0.008 percent.”

But this is a case where percentages don’t matter when judging if something is harmful. Suppose one man is stronger than a majority of women in any particular sport. In that case, his inclusion in women’s sports is a danger to every female competitor, even though he is only one man. The fact that he might represent .01 or less of the total participants is meaningless to the ultimate threat he poses to women’s sports and their records of achievement.

Already, quite despite that they were each in the minority of participants, some 300 men have taken titles and championships away from women since transgenderism exploded into women’s sports.

Despite ignoring all this, The Crimson editorial goes on to blast the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for its recent move to ban transgender athletes.

After making all these assertions, The Crimson then claims the “science” proves its point and scolds the NAIA, barking, “Given the paltry numbers of trans athletes, without science strongly supporting the conclusion that transgender athletes hold an advantage, the NAIA’s hard-line approach to an essentially edge-case issue is reductive and discriminatory.”

“By shutting out trans athletes altogether, the NAIA has also fallen conspicuously out-of-step with organizations at the highest echelons of competitive sports, including the International Olympic Committee, which centers evidence-based reasoning and non-discrimination in its establishment of sport-by-sport policies,” the editorial claims.

The piece concludes by exclaiming, “The NCAA must not follow the NAIA’s ill-supported decision, and, in the interim, Harvard must vocally oppose this ban and support the rights of its trans athletes.”

Sadly, The Crimson relied more on assertions and cherry-picking the “science” to prove its point. Of course, there is nothing here that will help settle the debate over the commonsense solution of simply banning those with male bodies from competing as females, no matter how many drugs they pumped themselves full of or how many cosmetic alterations they’ve made to their bodies.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said that James Yuan was the author of the Harvard Crimson piece titled,  There Are Many Obstacles Facing Women’s Sports. Trans Athletes Aren’t One. He was not. The article was written by The Crimson editorial board.

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