Over the past couple of years, there has been a growing fear among some across the country and throughout the world that transgender women would threaten the sanctity of women’s sports and overrun women’s athletics with transgender women who dominate the competition. But one expert thinks even the thought of that happening is simply ridiculous.
Joanna Harper, a leading researcher of trans athletes and a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon Health and Science University, called out anybody who thinks that transgender women are going to take over women’s sports, calling the idea simply “ludicrous.”
“The idea that trans women are going to take over women’s sports is ludicrous,” Harper said according to the New York Times.
“This fear that trans women aren’t really women, that they’re men who are invading women’s sports, and that trans women will carry all of their male athleticism, their athletic capabilities, into women’s sports — neither of those things are true,” Dr. Harper continued.
Harper’s comments come after a study financed by the International Olympic Committee found that transgender women did not have the blanket and universal physical advantages over other women that many critics have thought and assumed. In fact, the study found that women assigned their gender at birth excelled more than transgender women in many key athletic categories.
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