New meta-analysis undercuts the common assertion that transgender women in sports have inherent physical advantages over their cisgender counterparts.
Researchers pooled more than 50 published studies that assessed the body composition, muscular strength and aerobic capacity of 6,485 people, including 2,943 transgender women and 2,309 transgender men. The review, considered the most comprehensive of its kind to date, found that transgender women who have undergone hormone therapy have physical fitness comparable to cisgender women.
While the analysis did not look at elite athletes, or capture every element of sports performance, it does challenge a common foundational belief among those pushing bans on transgender participation in sports.
Hormone therapy, critics argue, does not cancel out past exposure to testosterone during puberty, giving transgender women and girls an inherent, unfair advantage over cisgender women.
The review suggests otherwise. Although transgender women have slightly higher lean mass (a proxy for muscle) than their cisgender counterparts, there was no observable difference in upper or low body strength or in maximal oxygen consumption, a key measure of cardiorespiratory fitness. All of these measures were also much lower than in cisgender men.
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Few of the study participants included in the analysis were competitive athletes, so “we should be cautious about extrapolating directly to elite sport,” senior study author Bruno Gualano, an associate professor at the University of São Paulo’s Center of Lifestyle Medicine, told Live Science. But “if there were large, intrinsic physical advantages, we would expect to observe them even in non-athletic populations, and we do not.”
The meta-analysis comes as the Winter Olympics welcomes its first openly transgender athlete Ellis Lundholm, competing in mogul skiing for Sweden – and its governing body reportedly weighs new rules that could make her the last.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) medical and scientific director reportedly told members that transgender women athletes retain the “physical advantages of being born male” and a new eligibility policy based on this premise would “likely” cover cisgender women with naturally occurring “male” characteristics like an extra Y-chromosome or higher testosterone levels.
The new findings are unlikely to deter the IOC given a 2024 study on transgender athletes, partially funded by the organisation, found that transgender women actually faced several disadvantages in athletic competitions compared to their cisgender peers.
