Medical Journal Publishes 'Study' Saying Male Transgender Athletes Don't Have Advantage Over Women

Males are, generally, stronger, bigger, and faster than females. That's an obvious biological reality that's been widely acknowledged and accepted quite literally forever. Until about five minutes ago, when the political left decided that they wanted to support a completely absurd, nonsensical viewpoint. 

Then, they turned all their collective energies into rewriting history, science, and evidence in an attempt to justify their desire to put transgender athletes in women's sports. For the party that claims to be "the party of Science," it was a complete repudiation of their self-reported superiority. Not to mention the virtue signaling "In this house, science is real" yard signs.

Regardless, one of the dangers of this intellectual capture is that medical journals, which have become aligned with and allies of the political left, are party to it. It's one thing for political activists and sportswriters to defend the indefensible. It's another thing entirely for formerly reputable science-based institutions to do the same. 

RELATED: HS Girl Gives Powerful Testimony About Being Replaced By Transgender Athlete

Yet that's precisely what's happened. And even though the tides have slowly started to turn back towards biological reality, common sense, and competitive fairness, a new study published in the British Medical Journal shows there's still more work to do.

Penn swimmer Lia Thomas stands on the podium after winning the 500-yard freestyle as other medalists (L-R) Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan and Brooke Forde pose for a photo at the NCAA Division I Women's Swimming and Diving Championship on March 17, 2022, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images).

BMJ Publishes Laughable Review Supporting Trans Athletes

This study, which hit the BMJ website recently, is headlined, "Body composition and physical fitness in transgender versus cisgender individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis." We're already off to a rough start. And it gets much worse. 

Before going into how these researchers laundered bad science through an all-too-willing medical journal, here's their conclusion: "While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender."

This is, of course, false. All of it. It is obvious that males have "inherent athletic advantages" over females. 

Additionally, there are several methodological flaws with this conclusion and analysis. For example, the results from measurements of upper body strength differences between transgender males and women are extremely low quality. What does that mean? Well, the confidence interval of their review is -0.95 to 2.02. That's essentially saying that males could be 1) significantly weaker to women or 2) standard deviations stronger. It's a "we don't know," laundered as proof that trans athletes have no advantages.

It's the same problem with lower body strength. There, the confidence intervals are −1.31 to 1.40, a range so broad as to be functionally useless for making conclusions. There's also what's called "heterogeneity" in the samples, implying that the included studies aren't necessarily measuring the same effect. 

Even within the study, they admit that the research they included ranged from low to very low quality, with several inconsistencies. Just over a handful even adjusted for confounders, and importantly, physical activity and training was not measured consistently. Their conclusion is completely unjustified by what their own included evidence shows. Though it is perfectly designed to grab headlines from media partners.

There are several other issues, including wildly inconsistent standardized mean differences when comparing transgender male athletes to women, and transgender female athletes to men. 

But all of this pales in comparison to the underlying issue. Of course, males have physical advantages over women. That's why for the overwhelmingly vast majority of world records in athletic competitions, men have a 10-15% advantage over women. It's also why male athletes playing on women's teams stick out like a sore thumb. We have plenty of science confirming this, but because medical journals are completely captured, they're willing to publish garbage to argue against reality.