Race Times for Transgender Athletes

In recent years, organizations such as the International Olympic Committee have created regulations to allow those athletes who have undergone gender reassignment to compete in their chosen gender. Despite these rules, there is still a widespread belief that transgender female athletes have an inherent advantage over 46,XX female competitors. Until now, there has not been any published data, based on performances of transgender athletes, to either support or refute this belief. There are two main stumbling blocks to creating such a study: the first is to determine an appropriate metric to examine and the second is to find participants for the study. This study analyzed race times for eight transgender female runners, who have competed in distance races as both male and female, using a mathematical model called age grading. Collectively, the age graded scores for these eight runners are the same in both genders.