Hi @youngwomenscot @EHRC @EHRCChair @KishwerFalkner @RJHilsenrath @trussliz @GEOgovuk

The Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form in your trustee application has 'gender identity' in what apears to be a list of the protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.

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TERFs are TERDs

Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists are clearly misnamed.

Trans-Excoriating Reproductive Determinists
is far more accurate.

Written by an amazing Aussie Trans woman High School teacher. She nails this👍
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They don’t merely exclude. They are obsessed with criticising trans people. They are not given true personhood status, they are to be belittled and mocked.
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Trans people don’t even get the respect of their lived reality from TERFs. Apparently it’s completely fine to say that trans people don’t know themselves - that their lived reality is fantasy.
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Despite the phenomenon arising in human beings across thousands of years and in all cultures - they’re ALL making it up.
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Despite the psychology profession recognising it as just a distinct way of being human. Not an illness or syndrome. A way of being. Medical and biological findings back it, but we are dealing with dogmatic thinking.
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Here follows my quick first thoughts of Roberts et al., 2020.

I predict this paper will generate much discussion over the coming weeks and months.

The link to the paper is here:

The authors studied 46 transwomen (TW) and 29 transmen (TM), majority in active service with the US Air Force.

Highly-active people, albeit not specifically-trained athletes. Mean age 26.6 yrs +/- 5.5 yrs.

Transgender officers were treated along standard hormone regimes. There is “documented suppression” of testosterone in TW but no raw numbers. Similarly, there are no raw numbers for TM.

USAF officers are subject to annual fitness tests, comprising push-up/sit-up reps per minute and a timed 1.5 mile run.

The performance of TW/TM over 30 months of treatment was retrieved from official records and compared with pre-treatment “baseline” performance.

New study on transgender & performance. The paper’s title could've been “Significant endurance & strength-endurance advantages are retained for up to 2 years despite T reduction in TW: Implications for the assumptions of fairness in current policies”. Some thoughts to follow

First, remind ourselves of the principle and why the results matter. Sports policies have allowed inclusion of TW who lower T for 12 months on the assumption that this removes the male physiological advantages sufficiently to create fairness when women’s sport is “opened” up (2/)

The obvious (though amazingly unasked) question is “Is there evidence showing that this actually works? In other words, does T suppression remove the biological advantages that necessitate a separate women’s category in sport?" This is the question the study is trying to address:

The study includes 46 trans women (TW) and 29 trans men, all in the Airforce. It capitalises on the practice of physical fitness assessments every 12 months to track how performance in push-up, sit-ups and 1.5 mile run changes when T is either reduced (TW) or increased (TM) (4/)

The TW and TM results are, correctly, compared to ciswomen and cismen, respectively. They have data for over 2 million CM and 500,000 CW for these comparisons. So it’s about tracking the changes in performance with T alteration AND comparisons to the appropriate group (5/)