Propagandists Love Their Cherrypicked Studies
The Washington Examiner thinks they’ve finally caught us wascally twanses.
by Evan Urquhart
Is he a trans guy? One can’t always tell, you know.
In a piece for the Washington Examiner (a right wing DC news website), Debra Soh discusses a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that looked at 15 trans women, 14 cis women, and 14 cis men to try and determine what, if any, advantages trans women might have in areas related to athletic performance. Soh’s bio lists her as a sex neuroscientist and podcast host, and since she’s writing for the Washington Examiner we can assume she’s also majorly transphobic.
Any discussion of transgender people’s participation in athletics tends to be swamped by transmisogyny before it can even get off the ground, and this column in no way breaks that mold. It discusses lung capacity and grip strength with the bias that trans women are interlopers who cannot be allowed to participate in athletics with other women at any level.
There are, however, ways to approach the question differently. One approach we’ve found that can be fruitful is to start from the opposite place this does, not with attempts to quantify advantages based on sex, or height, or weight, or other metrics, but with the simple question of what is the purpose of athletics? Most people aren’t elite athletes, and so the purpose is physical health, emotional thriving, team work, caraderie, and a chance to experience healthy competition. Looked at from this angle, the issue of how to include trans people in sports becomes consumed in the larger question: How do we ensure that everyone gets to experience healthy, age and body-type appropriate activity, according to their individual interests and talents?
That, however, is sadly not what Soh has made her focus. Instead, she’s cherrypicked a single study, with results she feels support a ban on trans women in women’s sports, and has generalized wildly from it, in a very unscientific fashion.
As a neuroscientist, Soh ought to know that this is not how science works. You don’t run a study on nonathletes and conclude that your results must be greatly magnified in athletes, because you haven’t looked at that. The results of serious training could tend to magnify the differences, or equalize them, or it could even flip the picture giving trans women a disadvantage. (There’s no reason I’m aware of to think the last option is true, but it is a possibility a real scientst would want to remain open to.)
To sum up, Soh’s approach to the question of trans inclusion puts the cart before the horse, centering transmisogyny rather than starting from the much firmer foundation of wanting all people to be able to have the benefits of athletics in a fair and healthy environment, which in many cases might mean co-ed athletics, sometimes could mean seperating sports by gender (although weight class, height, or ability level would likely be better options), and at the absolute highest levels of professional sports might sometimes require scientific rulings on whether trans athletes have an unfair competitive advantage. It’s a complicated topic, and one cherry-picked study of a handful of nonathletes simply does not settle it.