Not quite sure I get what the graphs were trying to represent...
It looks like the idea of trying to use Testosterone testing to separate women and men in sports will have problems as there is enough overlap in T levels between the sexes that a cisgendered woman might be tagged as being a cisgendered man and a cisgendered man as a cisgendered woman. How far off am I?
Yeah for sure, I think that's one aspect - you can't just say anyone above this level is a man, anyone under is a woman. There's also the observation that for T levels as well as a whole bunch of other metrics like height/weight/etc, the AVERAGE difference between a cis man and a cis woman is way smaller than the spread of differences within the gender. I also thought the point about endogenous T levels NOT being correlated to athletic performance was super interesting - it seems like your body's baseline T level is just a 0 point, and if you do something to increase from your baseline, athletic performance improves, but there are still cis men with T levels 80x lower than other cis men but who are still competing at an elite level, because that 0 point is just different but it doesn't mean that one has an advantage over the other. So all this talk about gendering people based on T level is just nonsense based on a faulty premise that a higher baseline is an inherent advantage, which it isn't.
I guess a better way to frame it in my mind is "endogenous Testosterone doesn't give an advantage like anabolic steroids do, at least as far as muscle development.
Not quite sure I get what the graphs were trying to represent...
It looks like the idea of trying to use Testosterone testing to separate women and men in sports will have problems as there is enough overlap in T levels between the sexes that a cisgendered woman might be tagged as being a cisgendered man and a cisgendered man as a cisgendered woman. How far off am I?
Yeah for sure, I think that's one aspect - you can't just say anyone above this level is a man, anyone under is a woman. There's also the observation that for T levels as well as a whole bunch of other metrics like height/weight/etc, the AVERAGE difference between a cis man and a cis woman is way smaller than the spread of differences within the gender. I also thought the point about endogenous T levels NOT being correlated to athletic performance was super interesting - it seems like your body's baseline T level is just a 0 point, and if you do something to increase from your baseline, athletic performance improves, but there are still cis men with T levels 80x lower than other cis men but who are still competing at an elite level, because that 0 point is just different but it doesn't mean that one has an advantage over the other. So all this talk about gendering people based on T level is just nonsense based on a faulty premise that a higher baseline is an inherent advantage, which it isn't.
I guess a better way to frame it in my mind is "endogenous Testosterone doesn't give an advantage like anabolic steroids do, at least as far as muscle development.