A popular concern raised while discussing this issue of transgender people taking up space in sports is the competitive advantages that higher levels of testosterone might produce. Before starting, let me make it clear to the reader that transwomen who have been specifically targeted when it comes to this issue, are women. Transwomen are women. This is a fact that needs to be kept in mind as we go forward. Most people believe or are opinionated in thinking that transwomen are merely men dressed up in women’s clothes. When the truth lies far afar. And transwomen who are allowed to compete under the women’s category must have been undergoing hormone therapy for atleast ten years as a requisite to compete against other elite women. Ten years of hormone therapy would mean that the transwomen would have almost an equivalent amount of testosterone in her body to that of a ciswoman.

Now, coming on to the effects of testosterone on an athletes body and their performance, of course, it gives a positive effect with high bone strength, high level of haemoglobin in blood, longer bones etc. And this obviously does give the athletes with a higher level of testosterone with a competitive advantage when compared to all the other athletes.

But things aren’t that simple, especially when we are talking about gender and sex. Biology and nature is never linear, there are always deviations, it is always fluid.

Sports has always been running on a bimodial categorial system wherein we assume that men and women fall in neat little categories and there is neither anything in between nor any deviation from the assumed “normal” whatsoever. This bimodial categorization wherein we classify people with higher levels of testosterone as men and the ones with lesser amounts of that as women leaves out large categories of people wo might fall in between these categories.