Mick Hartley

From the Times:

Three of the four elite transwomen athletes who were taking part in a research study funded by the IOC have dropped out of the programme.

The study, being led by Joanna Harper of the University of Loughborough, now has only one athlete, understood to be the cyclist Emily Bridges, whose sporting performance, strength and speed are being assessed over a period of time after transitioning and undergoing hormone therapy. The results will then be benchmarked against the performances of athletes who were born female.

“Four athletes had signed up to the longitudinal study and three have dropped out,” Harper confirmed to The Times.

The IOC is funding the research with the aim of assessing the fairness of transwomen athletes — who were born male — competing in women’s competition with reduced testosterone levels. The IOC’s guidelines allow that to take place as long as transwomen athletes have had testosterone levels below 5nmol per litre for a year (men usually have 10 to 35 nmol/L, while a woman’s level is usually 0.5 to 2.4 nmol/L).

Bridges, who was prevented from competing in elite women’s races following a change to British Cycling’s rules last year, still hopes to do so in the near future and told ITV Wales in November that: “The reduction of testosterone creates a fair playing field.” The 22-year-old set a national junior men’s record over 25 miles in 2018 before transitioning.

It's not looking good.

A couple of points, though:

Firstly, the way it's stacked there's a clear motivation for Emily Bridges to under-perform in the study, to bolster the idea that reduced testosterone levels do indeed make for a "fair playing field".

Secondly, it's not mentioned in the report but Joanna Harper is a trans woman and therefore hardly an impartial researcher.

We've been here before. Here's Harper last March, in another Times article where her transgender status wasn't considered worth mentioning:

We can have meaningful competition in sports between right and left-handers, and left-handers even have advantages in some. The broader question is whether we can have meaningful competition between trans women and other women. We will know more when we see more high-level athletes like Emily Bridges and Lia Thomas, but we don’t yet know for certain.

Yes we do know for certain. This pretence that more research is needed, and that really it's not much different from right-handers against left-handers, is an insult to our intelligence. Of course we know. Male puberty confers huge advantages in terms of strength and stamina. Testosterone levels are a red herring.

Men shouldn't be competing in women's sport – it's as simple as that.