Toxic Ivy
I listened to the Trans Women in Sport segment of Today, which starts at about 1 hour 40 minutes and ends at 1:48. It’s not a conversation between “Veronica Ivy” and Sharron Davies; Ivy gets a segment and then Davies gets one.
Ivy says around 1:41: “Here’s the thing about Emily in particular: because she was a member of the British Cycling academy, they have years of her power data, they know how much her power numbers went down, so they know for a fact that she does not have an unfair competitive advantage.”
Wait. What? Emily’s numbers went down, therefore it’s a fact that he does not have an unfair competitive advantage. But we don’t know how much the numbers went down, or how they compare to women’s numbers. A mere “Emily’s numbers went down” tells us nothing.
That’s especially true because we already know that such numbers go down a little, but we also already know that the gap is large, which is why women’s sports exist. We also already know, and the presenter points out to Ivy, that much of male physical advantage is baked in: males are bigger, heavier, with bigger bones, wider shoulders, straighter thighs, bigger rib cages, yadda yadda.
In short, Doctor Ivy bullshits his share of the discussion.
Ugh, I hate that. The New Yorker Lia Thomas piece pulled that shit, too. Random data that doesn’t mean anything gets tossed into the discussion just to confuse and distract us.
It is ANNOYING.
The power will certainly go down but larger heart and lungs mean that you can sustain that power level for far longer. Not to mention that the male skeleton means that the power is transferred more effectively to the pedals.
This is why people need to stop talking about current testosterone levels. It is the effect of male puberty that is the major factor and you never lose it.
It should not really be a surprise to anyone that male athletes who choose to self-harm impair their physical performance in doing so. That is not remotely the same thing as making them not male athletes anymore.
And even if performance did go down exactly the right amount to place trans women’s performance smack in the middle of the female averages – which would be quite the coincidence to happen once, let alone every time a male took T suppression – he’s still male and therefore not in the protected group. The entire argument about reduced performance is not only contradicted by all evidence, is it also a red herring.
A man that has reduced physical performance for some reason is not thereby a woman. His sex remains male, so that’s his competitive division. Whether that loss of performance is permanent or short term, whether it comes from taking a course of T suppressants, or from any other thing – asthma, cerebral palsy, the common cold, food poisoning, losing a leg in a car accident, paraplegia – a male person is still male. Not a very athletically competitive one, but again, that has never enabled anyone to step down the difficulty curve outside of their peer group.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics, right? It’s so easy to lie with numbers by avoiding some information. “Veronica” is enough of an academic to understand that, and clearly unethical enough to manipulate the data (or the understanding of it) to push his political agenda.