I uh… citation? This is pure misinformation. If this were even remotely true, anabolic androgenic steroids wouldn’t be used in every sport to gain an advantage. Along with hGH, IGF-1, HCG, LH, FSH, A-dex, Clomid, etc. People use this stuff for a reason. And women who take exogenous testosterone experience a thing called virilization. It’s… kind of how you transition F-> M.
Men with sub 300 ng/dl often experience pretty extreme symptoms, including depression, lethargy, and low libido. The “normal” range for men includes men in the 80s & 90s. 200 is normal, but not for a healthy 25 year old male.
The male range for “normal” keeps getting lowered too. Used to be 1400ish. Then 1100. Now under 1000.
Men aren’t tested for testosterone levels per se, but they are tested for evidence of raising them through exogenous supplementation. This is how people get suspensions for using steroids. Steroids are just… well, testosterone or derivatives. Testosterone causes increased nitrogen retention, increased muscle mass, increased metabolism, increased oxygen efficiency… literally everything an athlete would want. Hell, dianabol was specifically made to enhance our olympic athletes.
We have to stop denying science because we don’t like how it feels. Steroid hormones have functions in the body. You change those, the body changes. What a person does with them should be up to the person IMO.
Ugh. Saying that it’s normal for a male to have 200 ng/dl because someone had it naturally is akin to saying that not producing insulin should be considered normal because it happens. It’s not good. It’s not healthy. If the nation didn’t have this weird obsession with how many times some guy in tight pants hit a ball with a stick, this would be a whole different conversation, but the fear of steroids has ruined all reasonable talk about hormones.
It’s really manufactured to me to qualify this because the human body produces 50 different hormones and people think it’s only estrogen and testosterone? It’s soooooooo appalling Freudian that our culture is so obsessed with E vs T. Like an Olympic female sprinter has a WHOLE heck of a lot more going on with her hormones than a couch potato who’s also XX.
Yeah I agree with @brute on this. There is definitely an advantage to higher testosterone in sports, which is why it’s tested as the threshold for competing in women’s sports. I just think it’s absurd to only use that number when it’s entirely possible for a woman to have naturally occurring high levels of testosterone. Those higher levels will increase her performance, but I don’t think that makes her unfair competition for other women since it is natural variation.
Also I just read that lowered estrogen causes an increase in inflammation (hence you’re more likely to get UTIs on your period). So as a total layperson theorizing: doesn’t a female athlete with naturally low levels of E face an uphill battle to recover and improve performance if her inflammation is much higher? Does the naturally very high E female athlete have an unfair advantage because of extremely low inflammation and rapid recovery? I mean …I would think of course not. There’s 50 hormones and the human body doesn’t live or die on E vs T. Of course high T can result in a person having increased muscle mass. But … Not every XX person with naturally high T is going to become an Olympic athlete. These athletes dedicate their lives to this. If their body is suited for it god bless them. Michael Phelps is an incredible athlete because his body produces very little lactic acid. Is it “fair?” No but who cares
Yeah, I think what’s happening is we used to delineate fairness in athletic competition according to sex. If you were female nothing else was relevant and if you were male nothing else was relevant. Kind of like what we do with para sports. If you’re able bodied…you can’t compete against any of us, period. Nothing else about you is relevant if you don’t have a physical disability. You even have to go through an exam to find out which category of disability you are so you’re competing against people in a fair way, like I will never compete against a blind climber, and a blind climber will never compete against an amputee.
Dividing sports by sex alone is not doable anymore, but there has to be some kind of threshold for what makes someone allowed to compete against women, for fairness sake. Women’s sports exist for a reason and I do think they need to be protected. I think looking at testosterone was the easiest way they could come up with as a threshold for “womanhood” so to speak, even though there is so much more to being female than that. This is all super new and only went into effect in the last couple years so it hasn’t been impacting women’s sports for that long. It’s interesting and I’m glad we can talk about it here.
Where do you all keep important papers? I literally never gave it a thought until my boss asked me yesterday. I don’t have many important things, so I think a safe deposit box is overkill. Should I get a fireproof box thingy? I definitely do not need a safe.
Specifically for running, testosterone levels don’t have a consistent effect on speed except for maybe sprinting but it’s a small effect and the variation in natural T levels is very wide in elite athletes.
I was also thinking about how this Convo would look different across different sports (fencing, javelin, synchronized swimming, diving , speed skating). We’ve accepted that basketball players whether XX or XY competition, are very tall. That’s just how it is. If you’re 5’0" you don’t dream of playing pro basketball. (probably same for volleyball too) whether or not high T really confers such an advantage to track and field sprints, maybe you only sprint if you have high T and why would that be such a big deal
Right, Michael Phelps had giant feet which help make him fast at swimming. We don’t disqualify people with “abnormally” large feet from Olympic swimming because it’s unfair, we think it’s cool that his particular biological anomaly made him better at swimming.
Testosterone is tested in every olympic sport. Exogenous administration has a pretty massive difference the endogenous production. Also, the weightlifters are likely using steroids and masking them. It’s an arms race.
I obviously care a lot of the topic of performance enhancement and hormones. I’m sorry for the intensity of the response, and my comments aren’t about who should and shouldn’t be able to compete, I think it’s a travesty that we would measure testosterone by itself and use that the determine anything. Artificially raising it is a problem, but not naturally occurring variances.
Topical test cream though? Really? It needs to be injected to be effective at any reasonable rate.
Is this true?
t’s testosterone that determines whether a developing baby will have male or female genitalia—its presence helps prompt the embryo to go down the male route.
So, testosterone determines which chromosomes you have? That goes directly against what I recall of genetics…
Another problem, these folks are testing total test, not free. If your SHBG is low, your total test might be low to the amount available to use is higher.
Test doesn’t do it all, but it does prompt the liver to pump out IGF, which is the big anabolic.
Testosterone itself doesn’t do it for you, but it makes it easier to recover. Estrogen is necessary too, and a lot of guys ruin themselves taking anti-estrogen meds trying to raise test. No estrogen means no ability to become physically aroused.
Athletes often shy away from test though. They’ll take hgh (which permanently increases the number of muscle fibers) and TB-500 & EPC-157 to heal faster and reduce inflamation and Anavar which has a higher anabolic rating, improves athletic performance, lower androgenic rating, and doesn’t add bulk so much as increase the ability to use what you have and built a little lean mass.
Yes, women have to have testosterone levels under a certain threshold to qualify for competition against women, like Laurel Hubbard, who is trans and will be competing in lifting this coming Olympics. I think she is Canadian?
It is true that different attributes are more beneficial in certain sports, but I don’t think that means it makes sense to do away with sex categories. Across nearly all sports men dominate by a pretty large margin. And, I think we do care about unfairness in sports to a degree when it’s categorical, or else we wouldn’t separate competition by sex to begin with, or age for that matter! We don’t let 15 year olds compete against 10 year olds, for example, even if they are the same sex or have the same hormone levels or the 10 year old looks much older. The imbalance is simply too big between those two ages. Ditto with para sports. You can literally be on disability for something totally legitimate and not qualify for para sports due to not meeting the threshold for being physically disabled, like people who are chronically ill or mental ill, for example.
At some point this analogy breaks down from being too simplistic, but we also don’t have a “short people basketball” category in the Olympics. Either you’re good enough to play against people with more “beneficial” genes for height and arm length, or you aren’t.
No, testosterone governs whether the fetus will have external or internal genitalia. XY fetuses with androgen insensitivity disorders’ testes and penis stay internal (but do stay testes and penises, not ovaries and uteruses) and you can’t tell that it’s not a “normal” baby girl or human woman until you do a genetic screening or look for causes of infertility.
True, but short people are not a protected class and women and disabled people are. We do have para sports (and the special olympics), including wheelchair basketball. I mean, they definitely wouldn’t make a regular NBA team because of their physical disadvantage, but there is still a route to fair competition against other wheelchair athletes, which feels right because they are a protected class. I think that’s very different than having, like, short person basketball or inflexible person gymnastics, etc. Those are just people who are part of a broader category and who aren’t good enough to compete, for a variety of reasons, including genetics.
I get what you mean, and I don’t entirely disagree, but women aren’t a protected class, gender is a protected class. Men (and nb people) have the exact same “protections” as women and I bristle at wording that implies women need to be “protected” from men competing against them.
An elephant in the room is that this is all about gatekeeping who is a woman and who isn’t, especially since women’s sports has been used by transphobes as a wedge issue for decades now. I think it goes without saying that trans and non-binary people in general and especially trans femmes are extremely sensitive about this and other attempts at gatekeeping, like bathroom bills.
Also, trans athletes have been eligible for the Olympics since 2004 and you haven’t seen trans women dominating because men wanted to falsely claim they were women to dominate a lower tier.
There’s also the question of discrimination against intersex individuals like Caster Semenya.
Title 9 does protect on the basis of sex? Though? Unless that has changed and I’m totally out of date. I realize that’s for college, etc. but that’s where I was getting the sex as a protected class thing.