‘There’s no reason to ban us from playing’: Analysis debunks the idea that transgender women have an inherent physical advantage in sports

The most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date shows that transgender women who receive hormone therapy exhibit physical fitness comparable to cisgender women.

The review, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on Tuesday (February 3), examined 52 published studies that assessed body composition, muscle strength and aerobic capacity in approximately 6,500 individuals, including approximately 2,900 transgender women and 2,300 transgender men.

But what does that mean for actual performance in women’s sports?

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While the study refutes claims that trans women have an inherently unfair advantage due to certain fundamental physical characteristics, it was not targeted at elite athletes and does not capture all factors involved in sports performance, experts said.

“Sports is multicausal,” lead study author Bruno Guarano, associate professor at the Center for Lifestyle Medicine at the University of São Paulo, told Live Science via email. “Quality of training, access to facilities, psychological stress, and exposure to discrimination all influence performance, but these factors are rarely captured in physiological studies.”

However, experts told LiveScience that they are against a complete ban on trans women in competitive sports.

systematic analysis

This analysis was motivated by recent efforts around the world to ban transgender people from participating in sports competitions.

“Restrictions on transgender sports participation are becoming increasingly strict, often justified by claims that the physical benefits are significant and inevitable,” Guarano said.

Although circulating testosterone levels appear to increase muscle mass, strength, and aerobic capacity, these bans typically target transgender women and girls, often claiming that even past exposure to testosterone during adolescence gives individuals a lasting and inherent physical advantage over cisgender women.

To see if that’s the case, researchers pooled data from a number of studies that adopted different approaches and measures to compare physical fitness in transgender and cisgender people. Study participants ranged in age from 14 to 41 years old, and most were adults.

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For transgender women, hormone therapy included different forms of estrogen and antiandrogens that suppress the effects of testosterone, while transgender men used different forms of testosterone. Most studies followed participants for approximately 1 to 3 years over the treatment period.

When normalized for height, “transgender women do not exhibit greater muscle strength or aerobic capacity than cisgender women after gender-affirming hormone therapy,” Guarano said. It involves both upper and lower body strength.

Transgender women also had similar fat mass to cisgender women.

They have slightly higher lean body mass, but that doesn’t translate into increased strength or maximum oxygen consumption, he noted. Guarano added that the team was unable to assess that because research rarely looks at specific athletic performance metrics.

Most of the study participants included in the analysis were not competitive athletes, so “we should be cautious about extrapolating directly to elite sports,” Guarano noted. But that being said, “If there was a large intrinsic physical advantage, you would expect to see it in non-athletic populations, but we don’t.”

“What’s new here is the consistency of these findings across many datasets,” Ada Chan, an endocrinologist and head of the Trans Health Research Group at the University of Melbourne, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science via email. The results challenge the notion that trans women are inherently athletic, she added.

Phoebe Toups-Dugas, associate professor of human-centered computing in the Exercise Games Lab at Monash University in Australia, who was not involved in the study, agreed.

“Contrary to the rhetoric used to drive transgender athletes out of sports, there is no evidence that transgender women have any advantage,” she told Live Science via email. “There’s no reason to ban us from playing.”

olympic competition

The U.S. Olympic Committee followed President Donald Trump’s executive order by banning transgender women from competing in women’s events, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has not yet done so. However, recent reports suggest that the situation may change as the IOC has announced that it will issue new rules this year. The IOC’s head of medical science reportedly said that even after hormone therapy, transgender women who have gone through male puberty retain physical advantages over cisgender women. He said the new rules could also apply to cisgender women who have “male” characteristics, such as a Y chromosome or “male levels” of testosterone.

Results from a recent meta-analysis do not support those rules, Guarano said. She added that while the new analysis can’t say anything about the fitness of cisgender women with relatively high testosterone, other data sets suggest that “performance is not determined solely by testosterone.”

“A major gap in the literature is our limited understanding of how hormonal effects interact with long-term training and social context, especially in women and gender diverse populations,” Guarano said. “Another gap lies in the assumption that a testosterone threshold neatly distinguishes between ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ competition. This idea is less scientifically robust than is often assumed.”

For now, the previous regulations remain in place for the 2026 Winter Olympics, which begin in Milan on February 6. Sweden’s Elise Lundholm will become the first openly transgender athlete to compete in mogul skiing at the Winter Olympics. As this discussion progresses, it is important to note that there are few studies tracking transgender athletes in high-stakes sports, in part because the competitive population is so small.

Given the lack of data on elite sports, analysis like Guarano’s could be extremely useful, Tups-Duga said.

“These discoveries are of great value to the IOC,” she said. “There is a huge opportunity here for the IOC to make the Olympics more diverse and truly support athletes.”

youth sports

Of course, most athletes don’t compete in the Olympics. Instead, many are children playing youth sports. At least 29 states in the United States currently ban transgender youth from competing on teams that align with their gender identity, and some of these bans have been legally challenged but are expected to be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2026.

Although the new meta-analysis included data from adolescents, there was not enough to draw firm conclusions about children’s body composition, Toups-Dugas said. “But I don’t think we need to make a wise choice.”

Chong agreed. “There is no evidence here to justify a categorical ban on transgender youth in sports.”