Science Vs - Trans Kids: The Misinformation Battle

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

U.S. politicians are trying to keep trans kids from getting the medical care they need to transition — and states are banning them from playing on the sports teams that match their gender. So we’re looking at the science here, and asking: are the medical treatments for trans kids dangerous? And do trans folks have an advantage when it comes to sports? We talk to Florence Ashley, Dr. Jack Turban, and Joanna Harper to find out. UPDATE 5/24/24: We have removed identifying information about the trans children we interviewed. UPDATE 5/17/22: A previous version of this episode incorrectly summarized a study from Seattle. We said those who got gender-affirming healthcare "felt better" after getting the treatment. The study actually found that those who got this treatment felt better compared to those who didn't get the treatment. The episode has been updated. Note: in this episode we discuss suicide and self-harm. Please take care when listening to the show, and here are some resources: Trans Lifeline: A Trans peer support hotline: [phone] Trevor Project: crisis support services to LGBTQ young people: Call 1-866-488-7386 or Text ‘START’ to 678-678 US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or text the Crisis Text Line (text HELLO to 741741).  International suicide hotlines: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines  Find our transcript here: bit.ly/sciencevstranskidstranscript This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, Rasha Aridi, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Wendy Zukerman with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Courtney Gilbert. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Nick DelRose. Consulting by Rebecca Kling. Music written by Mr Mu Menage, Leon Trapedera, Robby Bold, and Lucas Ambarga. Thanks to the experts we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Arjee Javellana Restar, Dr. Jody Herman, and Dr. Toni D’Orsay. Very special thanks to all the trans kids and their parents we heard from, Crispin Torres, Alex Blumberg, Jack Weinstein, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Before we start, this episode discusses suicide and self-harm. So please take care while you're listening. And if you want to talk to someone about this, check out our show notes for resources. So recently, we've been diving into misinformation on Spotify and focusing on the biggest show on the platform, the Joe Rogan Experience. Today, we're looking into a topic that Joe Rogan brings up quite a lot, and it's one that's been getting a lot of national attention recently too.

Kids who are transgender. So in January, Rogan had Jordan Peterson on his show, saying that most of these kids coming out as trans today aren't really trans. If you look at teenagers, for example, who want to switch his show, a journalist who talked about how many of these kids are coming out now, partly because their friends are doing it. And this is happening to parents all across the country. Teenage girls all of a sudden deciding with their friends that they're trans, wanting surgeries and hormones and getting them. And this fear of kids getting dangerous treatments when they don't need them

is something that Rogan has talked about for years. For him, he seems to be worried about little kids, like even toddlers. To inject hormones and chemicals and even surgery, that we really have a very limited understanding about how much this interaction between a scalpel and a baby body, how much of the impact that has. You're giving someone the green light? Is it they're talking about like making this kid a eunuch? And these worries are way bigger than Rogan.

Concerns around what's going on with all these trans kids reached fever pitch just a few weeks ago when the governor of Texas called medical treatments for trans teens child abuse. Legal battle playing out in Texas right now. Politicians in more than 20 U.S. states have been trying to ban trans kids from getting the medical care they say they need. And Tennessee are the latest states to sign anti-transgender legislation into law. And this battle isn't just over what happens in the doctor's office.

It's playing out in running tracks and school soccer fields across the country too. Eleven states in the U.S. have now passed legislation to stop trans kids from playing sports with the gender they identify with. So under these laws, trans girls couldn't play soccer with other girls. And one big thing that seems to be fueling all this is the panic over the fact that more and more kids are coming out as trans these days. And the worries around all of this have only grown since we covered the science of being transgender several years ago. So today on the show, we are asking 1. Why are all these kids coming out as trans now?

Could this be because it's a bit of a trend? 2. Is the treatment that trans kids are getting dangerous? And 3. When it comes to sports, do trans kids have an unfair advantage? When it comes to trans kids, there's a lot of... If you step in and you in any way... Teenage girls all of a sudden deciding what their friends are doing. ...unbearably confused. Adults talking.

So on this episode, we're going to look at the science, of course, but we're also going to hear from trans kids. We have a really rough world out there. Science Versus is coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the

center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves.

Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today we're talking about trans kids.

And we're going to start with why are more kids coming out as trans these days? Because it is true that more kids are going to the doctor because they feel distressed about their gender than before. Like one gender clinic in California reported that from 2015 to 2018, their average monthly referrals increased by five times. And other places are reporting this kind of thing too. So what is going on here? Well, one idea is that a lot of these kids aren't really trans,

but rather they're getting this idea from their friends. That is, it's a bit of a fad. In fact, the reason that Abigail Schreier was invited onto Rogan's show Rather, they're getting this idea from their friends. That is, it's a bit of a fad. In fact, the reason that Abigail Schreier was invited onto Rogan's show was to talk about this book that she wrote called Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. And on Rogan's show, she said that what inspired her was this particular study. There's an original study that the book jumps off from, which is the Lisa Littman paper at Brown University,

she's a public health researcher who looked into this, and she found that there was all of a sudden this huge epidemic in America of teenage girls deciding they were trans with their friends after social media emerged and pushing for hormones and surgeries. And this Littman paper, it's been really influential, not just for Abigail Schreier. The ideas in the paper have been used to shape some of the legislation that's limiting trans rights. And some parents of trans kids have been really convinced by these ideas that their kids aren't

actually trans. So let's dive into that paper. And we did ask to speak to the researcher who did the study, Lisa Lippman, but she didn't want to talk to us. Still though, reading her study, here's what she did. Lippman surveyed around 250 parents who said that their kids basically turned trans overnight. And the vast majority of these mums and dads said that their kids didn't show any signs of being trans when they were really little. It was almost like out of the blue. Hey mum, I'm trans. Many of the parents also said that their kids had at least one trans friend and that they spent a lot of time on social media before coming out. To top it all off,

some of the parents said that their kids got more popular after coming out as trans. Like one parent said, quote, Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens. Based on this work, Lippmann wrote that these kids were possibly socially influenced when they came out, and she described it as a new kind of phenomenon called rapid-onset gender dysphoria. And while in the paper Lippmann is fairly cautious, others have gone to town with this idea. So could it be true? Could a lot of the kids coming out as trans today be doing it because

that's what the cool kids are doing? Well, Florence Ashley at the University of Toronto says we've got to be very careful with this litmus paper. It looks like it's something very scientific. And if you don't know what you're doing, if you're not, you know, deep in the swamp, wading through the waters that is science, you're probably going to look at this and go like, oh, yeah. Florence wrote a critique of Lippmann's study. And one of Florence's big problems with it is where Lippmann found the parents for her study. It seems like Lippmann was looking for a particular kind of parent because to find them, she didn't say randomly select parents of trans kids. No. Instead, she posted her survey on several websites that are specifically made for parents who are

concerned about what's going on with trans kids these days. Here's Florence. When we saw that that's where they recruited, first of all, like anybody who is remotely familiar with transphobia in social media was like immediately knew what those websites were. And you were just like, okay, like this is ridiculous. And this was like the original sin. It tainted the whole paper for researchers like Florence because it skewed the data. It meant that if you're using this study to paint a picture of the entire trans community, you can't because it's suffering from what's called selection bias. Lippmann selected certain parents and she didn't get a representative sample. You can think

about it like this. Most of these parents didn't believe that their kid was really trans. So it's not surprising that they were then looking for other ways to explain what was going on with their kid. It'd be like trying to study the sexual health of gay men by recruiting parents of gay people from like an ultra conservative evangelical megachurch like not helpful another thing that's a bit dodged with this paper is that while the parents might love their kids and be genuinely worried about them parents don't always know what's happening in their kids' heads. Producer Meryl Horne talked to Florence about this. Did they talk to the trans kids themselves? Absolutely not. They did not talk to the trans kids themselves. It was purely the parents. How could a parent know if a kid is just

doing this to be in the in crowd? It's very possible that the kids started to feel like they were a different gender once they hit puberty, which is something that science knows can happen. Not all trans kids work this out when they're very little. Or, Florence says, it's possible that maybe these kids did know something was up earlier on, but just didn't want to talk to their parents about it. I mean, they want to say that it's rapid for the youth, but really it's rapid for the parent

because it's all based on the perception of the parent. And one final thing that's made Florence and many people in the scientific community really skeptical here is that kids would do this because being trans is cool. Now, while some trans kids might get a lot of support when they come out, when researchers actually survey trans folks, on average, they find a pretty horrifying picture. So, for example, a U.S. survey of nearly 28,000 trans and gender-diverse adults found that more more than three quarters who were out or perceived as trans in school said that they got treated badly. That's three out of four. A quarter got beat up.

More than one in 10 was sexually assaulted. And almost one in six left school because it got so bad. When you hear that idea that people are coming out as trans teenagers because it's cool. In literally which world, this idea that being trans is the easy way out is utterly nonsensical because like, let's face it. yes, trans people joke about how trans people are better than cis people. It's not, nobody is taking it seriously. It's largely a way of coping with a world that's constantly telling you that being trans is the literal worst thing to be, that it's disgusting and that you should be ashamed of it. So people are taking a bit of pride back. We wanted to hear from trans kids about all of this, about what it was actually like to come

out. And so we called up a bunch of them. I am 12. It was second grade when I completely turned. I got bullied a lot because of it. That's one of the main problems, bullying. That makes it so hard. So they would just pick on me and bully me as much as they could, anytime they could. We have a really rough world out there. 12. I'm going to be real. I'm from Florida. If you're doing that to be cool, you might be a little dumb. So I was about 16 when I started thinking about it. It was scary. I was like, what's going to happen if I come out as trans? What happens if this gets out? Am I going to be in physical danger? But not everyone we spoke to had a hard time coming out. I'm 10 years old. Yeah, I remember I went with my teacher. We sat down in front of the class and I was like, yes, it's happening.

And I was so excited. They were all very happy. And I think they sang like a celebration song for him at school. They did? Mm-hmm. Were they saying happy birthday or something? They sang, And as for this idea that trans kids picked up this idea from their friends,

well, for the kids we spoke to, it was the other way around. Most of them didn't know any trans people until they themselves started thinking that perhaps they were trans. I was, like, really happy to meet other people who have that experience. Most of us are some form of, you know, queer, bi, gay, trans, and we were kind of just like the weird kids. You just feel, you feel safe. I felt finally comfortable.

Hey, this is what I'm going through. I'm not alone. Let's be friends. Let's be besties. Let's be buddies. So we're not seeing evidence for this idea that kids are coming out as trans in droves because it's a fad. But this still leaves us with the question of why are more kids coming out? Well, we don't have a lot of good research on this, but one idea is that it's just because people are talking about being trans more often.

It's more visible with more trans folks on TV and more resources online. So for kids who are struggling with their gender, it's easier for them to find out what might be going on. There's also some evidence that kids are finding online communities where they feel safe. And that also might mean that they feel more online communities where they feel safe, and that also might mean that they feel more comfortable coming out in the real world. All right, our next question. Once kids do come out, what happens next? Are they being shoved onto serious life-changing treatments? Because people like Rogan are up in arms about this, saying that we're injecting nasty chemicals and even doing surgeries on toddlers.

But under the current guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, if you think your little kid might be trans, you don't do any of that stuff. No medication, no surgery. You start slow with something called social transitioning. If your kid wants to change their name or cut their hair short or wear a pretty dress, you say, go for it. And just doing this kind of thing, it can make a big difference. So let's go back to one of the trans boys who we met before. He was the one that came out to much fanfare when he was in kindy. But before all that, there were actually some pretty tricky times,

which we talked about with his mum. I don't know why, but I thought boys were, like, cool, and I wanted to be cool, like, boys. Well, I also wanted, like, a a penis I just told my parents I said that I want to be a boy but then he started saying things that were really shocking to hear from a three and four year old he would start to say things like if I were to die what if I were to die and come back as a boy would that be okay what if I were to go back into your stomach would I have to die if I were to die, what if I were to die and come back as a boy, would that be okay? What if I were to go back into your stomach? Would I have to die if I go back into your stomach? And he started

talking about dying and death. And to hear a three or a four-year-old say that, for me as a parent, I mean, that's shocking. We saw him just starting to retreat inward. Like, I guess I wasn't like myself. The kid that we knew was starting to go away and we didn't understand it. I Googled exactly phrase word for word what he was saying. And then I started seeing transgender parents across the board saying, yep, welcome to our club. I was like, oh. She wanted to support her kid and so did her husband.

But they weren't sure the right thing to do. You know, we felt this fear of like well I don't want to force him to be a boy if he's really not a boy and I don't want to make him be a girl if he's not a girl and we were just it was this really fine line that we were kind of dancing around for a while. Do you remember the last time we forced you? Oh it's so awful. We forced you to wear a dress. Oh, it tears at my heart. He was so young. When he was four, it was a preschool graduation and I really wanted him to wear a dress. And this is so terrible. I said, men wear dresses. And so I got out Google and I was like, men with a dress. And I was showing him pictures of men in dresses. And I can remember still watching the kids walk in from, you know, they walk in as the procession and his face,

he was just down, you know, and he was just like this and just, oh, and he was so uncomfortable. And if I had just let him wear a pair of pants with a shirt and a tie up there, we would have for sure seen a different, a kid it breaks my heart to think about it and um and that was the last time I mean I was like no we're never doing this again it was just so it was so silly of me to have wanted that for him do you remember when you got your hair cut do you remember that experience I wanted to be bald or something something like that. So then I got it pretty short, like pretty short close to bald, but it's not bald. It was like so short.

After I got it, then we looked in the mirror and I went big smile on my face. And then I said, when do I get a penis? I was like, when do I get a penis? I was like, when do I get a penis? That was it. Completely transformed and everybody saw it. I mean, instantly. It's just like this child just came back to life or came to life for the first time. All this joy just flooded right back into him, you know?

So if you hear about three or four-year-olds transitioning, we're not talking about medicine. We're talking about buzz cuts and wearing pants. But it's not going to be haircuts forever. Kids will eventually need to make some tough decisions about whether to start taking medication like hormones. And it's these kinds of drugs that have got politicians up in arms. Bills across the U.S. call this medicine dangerous.

They say that it can make kids infertile, sometimes even claiming that these treatments amount to genital mutilation. Oh, I'm very much opposed to chemical castration of minors. I mean, I think that that's a really, really, I mean, honestly, I didn't even know that this existed. You know, we have a gender clinic here in our state, and they are treating children as young as six years old with puberty blockers. And those drugs have terrible lifelong negative effects. That's coming up after the break. Welcome back.

We just heard that when kids who might be trans are really little, you don't inject them with chemicals, no surgery, nothing like that. The only use of scissors is if they want to cut their hair. But as the little tykes get older, things change, and they might decide to go on meds. And politicians around the country are trying to stop this from happening, because they say that these meds are dangerous, that the treatments are experimental, and there's no good proof that they actually help kids. We talked about all this with Jack Turbin, a psychiatrist from Stanford who treats trans and gender diverse kids. And he told us, let's slow down here. Yeah, so this is a thing where people get really confused and it causes a lot of problems.

Jack says that it's only when trans kids hit puberty that they might go on medication. And there are often two steps here. So first, kids can start with puberty blockers. And then later, they might decide to go on hormones. So let's look at puberty blockers first. They suppress hormones that trigger puberty. The thing about puberty blockers is if you start them, you can always stop them and then the person's going to go through the puberty they were going to go through anyway. It's reversible. It's reversible.

On the flip side, puberty itself, we can't undo that. And the whole point of puberty blockers is that they give kids more time to sort through things before their body really starts to change. And so it's great that they are reversible. But the big question is, are they safe? Well, we've been using them for more than 30 years for kids who start puberty at a super young age. It's called precocious puberty. And as best as science can tell, those kids who are on them are healthy when they grow up. But a concern that has come up for trans kids on these blockers

has to do with their bones. One important thing to know about puberty blockers is that while you're on them, your bones don't mineralize in the same way. Yes. So hormones, the kind that rush through your body during puberty, help your bones to grab minerals like calcium to build them up. To get the more hard, like stony chemicals into the bones that are really strong. If you stay on puberty blockers forever, your bones could get really brittle and be at risk of breaking. So in 2015, a study of 30 trans kids who were on puberty blockers

found that they had a lower bone mineral density than you would have expected for their age. So we know that while kids are on puberty blockers, their bones don't seem to get as strong. But what about once trans kids go on hormone therapy? Like, do they catch up with this new flood of hormones? Well, a study from 2020 looked at exactly this. They followed around 70 trans kids and looked at what happened after a few years of hormone therapy. And what they found was a little odd. Trans boys caught up with their peers while trans girls didn't.

Another study found something similar. Scientists are still trying to work out why this is, but for now what's important to know is that we don't actually know what this means in the real world. Like even for trans girls, are they breaking more bones, which is the thing we actually care about? And we're not seeing that, but it hasn't really been studied that well. So if you're going through all this, you have to weigh some unknown risks

against the risk of your kid going through a puberty that they don't want. And that might be hard to wrap your head around, particularly if you've never wondered, am I in the wrong body? But here's how Jack thinks about it. Imagine if that, if you're a cisgender person, imagine that's happening for you, right? Imagine that you are a boy and you wake up one day and you're growing breasts and you're menstruating and your voice is high and everybody's calling you a girl, but you're a boy, right? That's a really difficult experience. Two of the trans kids that we met before are actually on puberty blockers right now.

And I asked them what would have happened if their parents didn't let them go on puberty blockers right now. And I asked them what would have happened if their parents didn't let them go on puberty blockers. Like if they'd heard people say, oh, if you just do nothing, the kids quote unquote will be fine. Like, tell me about that. Like what would have happened if like... They won't be fine. I would have felt like really sad because I don't want to look like a boy when I grow

up. I want to look like a girl. That would have been very miserable for me. If I went through female puberty, I don't know. I would just want to stay home and hide myself for like a long time. I wouldn't want anybody to see me like that. I just can't even imagine what would happen if I wasn't on medicine. I mean, it would just be awful.

Terrible. So that's puberty blockers. Reversible and, from what we know, pretty safe. But there is a time that trans kids and their families will have to make a bigger decision. And that's whether or not to start hormone therapy, like taking estrogen or testosterone. And we know from studies that the vast majority of kids,

like more than 95%, who start puberty blockers, do end up going on hormones. So are they safe? We talked to Jack about them. Those change your body in ways that are not fully reversible, right? So once you have voice changes or body fat redistribution, that can't really be undone easily. Right, okay.

So that's when things start getting a little more serious. Yeah, bigger decision. Not only are these hormones not reversible, they also come with some medical risks, like estrogen might increase your risk of cardiovascular disease like blood clots, and testosterone can cause hypertension and mess with your liver. And a big concern is future fertility. There's a risk that if you go from puberty blockers and then hormones, you'll be infertile. We don't actually know whether that's

true or not, but given what we do know about the human body and hormones in general, Jack takes this risk very seriously. For that reason, we often have conversations with young people about banking sperm or preserving eggs. You can imagine they're really tough conversations to have with. Yeah. How old are the kids? Often 12, 13. And so we do recognize that it's hard for adolescents to project how they're going to feel about family building. Oh my God. Of course. You'd be like, ew, a kid. Well, I would have been like a kid. Why are we even talking about it? It depends on the kid. Some of them come in and say, I'm very clear in my sexual orientation that like I'm a transgender woman and I'm attracted to men.

And so at the end of the day, like if you have me being sperm, I'm going to have a partner who also has sperm. And we're still going to be in a very tricky situation where we're deciding which sperm to fertilize an egg with. So you'd be surprised how nuanced kids can be about these things. So overall, hormones have some risks and they're not easily reversible. But the top dogs in this space, they're all on board with this. Not only hormones, but puberty blockers too. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association,

the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. I could go on and on. Not controversial at all? No. And the reason that it's not controversial is because, again, we need to look at what happens if you do nothing. Like, you don't allow your kid to go on hormones.

And just last month, a study from Seattle was published looking at just this. It had followed about 100 young adults and compared those who got this gender-affirming care to trans folks who didn't. And they found that those who got gender-affirming care were 73% less likely to have thoughts of killing themselves or hurting themselves. Other research suggests the same thing. You see, over and over again, we're seeing that trans folks who don't get treatment and aren't supported have higher rates of attempting suicide and suicidal thoughts. Which is why these laws that politicians are pushing really don't make any sense. And hearing all of those stats in scientific papers, maybe it can be hard to know what this actually looks like for someone

going through it. So let's hear from someone that we heard from before. He's a trans man, and through middle and high school, he'd struggled with mental health issues. You know, growing up, it was very much on edge, like anxious all of the time. I attempted suicide at least three times by the time that I was 13. And I was self-harming on a day-to-day basis just because I genuinely did not like who I was. But then when he was around 15, he met someone who was trans for the very first time and couldn't get it out of his mind. Like, could that be me? I would go to sleep at night and I'm like, I wonder what I would look like with facial hair. I wonder what like my voice would sound like. I would try to make my voice deeper and be like, I wonder if that's what it would sound like.

I would stay up until like 3 a.m. And that was all I could think about. And then over the summer, it became this, there was this app, it became a trend. And you would take a picture of yourself and you could switch the gender so you could see yourself with facial hair. And I remember I was sitting in my mom's driveway and I was in my car. It was probably about May of 2021. I was home from college and I took a picture with it and I saw like the facial hair and I was like,

oh, that is who I want. Like that's who I am. Two months later, he started coming out to his friends and he hinted that he was trans to his grandma, but she wasn't having it. She said, you'll always be a girl. And then I went home and I laid in bed and I just, I started crying. And so I called my mom and I was like, mom, I'm a boy, I'm trans. And she was like, okay.

It was very sudden for her. When it did come out of the blue, it wasn't out of the blue for me. And so from there, she was just like, you know, I'm okay with it. I would rather have a happy son than a dead daughter. I think she really realized that no matter what, she would rather me be happy and alive than me end up committing suicide because I didn't feel like I was accepted. And the Abigail Shriers of the world seem to highlight people who regret their decision to transition. And his dad was worried about this too, particularly when he started hormones. And that I would regret this in 10 years was his biggest thing. He was like, I don't want you to regret this. And I was like, I'm not going to, I don't want you to regret this. And I was

like, I'm not going to regret this. I'm going to regret this if I don't do this now. And so I think he came around once he realized how happy I was and just, you know, the excitement that I had every time I saw a little bit of facial hair. Now he's like, oh, your facial hair looks good, dude. And calls me his son and he's like, like your voice dropped. And then makes fun of me for when my voice cracks. I'm the happiest that I've ever been in my entire lifetime. The science tells us that for most people who medically transition, their life gets better. And then we have lots of studies of adults who have transitioned using hormones and surgery, and the vast majority of them don't regret it. One of the largest studies of its kind, which surveyed thousands of transgender people,

found that less than 1% regretted having their testicles or ovaries removed. Less than 1%. But for the first time in a long time, he's excited about his future. So I graduate in a year. How is it going to feel when I walk across the stage with a beard and as a man, like how is that going to feel? So how will it feel? Oh, I think awesome. I changed my name last week legally. And so just hearing like my full legal name with like a full beard, I think it'll be like, oh, like I finally accomplished something as who I really am. It's going to feel amazing.

I'm so excited for it. All right. The final thing we're going to talk about today is trans kids in sport. So we know from research that playing sport can be great for kids. It's linked to lower levels of anxiety and having stronger bones when they grow up. But yet, in a bunch of states across the US right now, trans kids aren't allowed to play on the sports teams that match their gender. And this is all in the name of fairness, apparently. But some of these laws would hit younger kids,

kids who haven't even hit puberty, which seems kind of silly, because the research finds that at that age, there's no difference between boys and girls when it comes to sports. For example, one study showed that before they're 12, boys and girls are just as good at things like long jump or sprinting. There's even a study that looked at little kid weightlifters, including six-year-olds, and those little tykes didn't show any real difference until they were about 13. So splitting them up doesn't really make any sense.

But what happens when these kids get older? Well, most of the studies we have are for trans folks who went through puberty and only then transitioned as an adult. People like Fallon Fox. She's a trans woman mixed martial artist. And Joe Rogan has had a bee in his bonnet about her for almost a decade. It came up in his interview with Abigail Schreier. This person was a male for 30 years, became a woman for two,

and started beating the f*** out of women without telling them that she had been a male most of her life. Abigail was worried too. Women are getting beaten to a pulp by Fallon Fox, right? They were. Well, they were. But, you know, I mean, look who's standing up for women. That's the problem.

So, do we have a problem? Do trans women have an unfair advantage here? For this, we talked to Joanna Harper. She's a visiting fellow for transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in the UK. And she is a big rudder and a real numbers nerd. Running, you know, has become a part of my life. I once ran for 409 consecutive days.

And the fact that I can tell you that it was precisely 409 consecutive days tells you the fact that I can tell you that it was precisely 409 consecutive days tells you a lot about me. So what happened on the 410th day? I got shingles. Oh, it's a good excuse. That's a very good excuse. For Joanna, she started noticing changes to her running when she started transitioning. She was taking estrogen and a medicine that suppresses testosterone. This was back in 2004. And Joanna felt great about her decision. But when she got back to racing, she realized that this guy who she'd often beat before

was now winning. Like it didn't feel differently, but certainly I just couldn't run as fast. And even after three weeks of hormones, he was noticeably ahead of me. That certainly caught my eye that, you know, three weeks and it already started to have an effect on me. Joanna started tracking her race times over the next several months. And she saw that her times were getting slower and slower. I lost my complete male advantage with nine months of hormone therapy and I had no idea that would happen. And that's what sent me on this journey

because as a scientist, I was hooked, right? Why did this happen? So Joanna found seven other trans women who were runners and she did a study where she tracked how their race times had changed after hormone therapy. She looked at the race times before they transitioned and compared that to how competitive they had been against cis men, and then how they ranked against cis women after they transitioned. And here's the pattern she saw. On average, the runners lost their male advantage too. Yeah, their rank was basically the same against the women as it had been against the men.

Like for Joanna. Before my transition, I was 15 to 20 percent slower than the fastest man of my age had ever run for that distance. And after transition, now I'm still 15 to 20% slower than the fastest woman my age has ever run for that. Wow, it tracked basically exactly. Absolutely tracked, right, right, dead on, yes. Since Joanna's study was published, there has been some more research on this. One paper looked at around 40 trans women and it found that, again, after hormone therapy, the women got slower. But two years later, they still kept a bit of an advantage over cis women. Another paper coming out soon seems to suggest that trans women lose their advantage, but we're still waiting on more data. Still, this did make us wonder,

why are these women getting slower at all? And it looks like a big part of this has to do with hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the carrier of oxygen from the lungs to the muscles. And so it's the single most important factor for endurance athletes. Runners like Joanna have less testosterone in their body than before, and that means they're making less hemoglobin. Less oxygen is getting into their muscles, and so on average, they're running slower than before. But sport isn't just about getting oxygen to your muscles. In some cases, what's important is also just how big your muscles are. And there is some research to suggest that for trans women who have been through male puberty, their muscles on average are bigger than, say, mine. And that's because they got this big bump of testosterone during puberty. And testosterone?

It builds muscles. So there's more muscle produced. It's stronger. It's thicker. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind, or anyone else who's looked at this remotely closely, that trans women maintain strength advantages over cisgender women. I mean, there's no doubt of that. So we can see differences here, but how much of a difference do they make in the real world? Well, there's so few studies on this, it's actually hard to know. But generally, we can see that trans women aren't mowing down cis women. Like Leah Thomas, a trans woman just won an NCAA swimming title.

But the race was pretty tight. And take the Beijing Olympics. The first openly transgender woman competed, a weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard. But she didn't win any medals. She didn't win gold. Why is that? Well, not many people get to win Olympic gold medals, you know. They don't exactly grow on tree. The idea that because trans women have advantages that they're unbeatable or they're invincible isn't true. And Fallon Fox, that fighter that Joe Rogan talked about,

yeah, she was really good. She's retired now. But while competing, she didn't beat everyone to a pulp. In her fourth professional match fighting as a woman, she lost. Overall, when it comes to sport, Joanna says that going through male puberty can be an advantage. But that alone doesn't make you LeBron. All successful athletes have advantages and we allow advantages in sport.

And so my favorite example of advantages in sport are left-handed baseball players versus right-handed baseball players. The configuration of the diamond gives left-handed baseball players a lot of advantages. But we allow that advantage. In fact, if you listen to almost any baseball game, the righty-lefty thing gets talked about all the time. And, you know, it's seen as a plus for the sport of baseball that you have these two different kinds of athletes competing against one another, even though the left-handers have advantages. So we can have meaningful sport between two groups of people where one group has advantages over the other. And I posit that in most sports after hormone therapy, we can have meaningful sport between cis women and trans women.

When you zoom out, the panic around trans folks in sports feels totally overblown. Even at the highest levels, trans women aren't crushing other women. And when we bring this back to kids who just want to play with their friends, it feels like a bunch of politicians are just trying to score political points here. When we're talking about recreational sport, can't we just go and let people play?

Surely we can be human enough to allow that to happen. On top of all of this, that research that we've just talked about, it's not on trans kids who were on puberty blockers and then went straight onto estrogen, because those kids will never get that testosterone boost to their muscles from puberty. And for one of the trans girls that we spoke to, running was actually really important to her. We talked about it with her dad. So right now, she's allowed to compete with the other girls.

And I asked her if that was important, to be running with the other girls. Yes, it definitely is. Yeah, she says she would not run for the school if she couldn't run with the girls. Right. Running makes her such a happy person. People just think they're taking my spot away or they're taking my little meadow away. So she runs a lot of road races.

If somebody complains and screams and wants the meadow, we just set it down and walk away and let them have it. Yeah. Meadows don't mean anything to us. We got boxes and boxes of them at home. They can have all the ones they want. And we don't want to fight. We don't want a problem. So if they want that medal, they can have it.

We talked about this with the 10-year-old boy who loved his buzz cut. And his mom told us that these bills about trans athletes are just bonkers to her and her son. You know, it would really, when he's 16 years old, it would not make sense for him to be on a girls' team. What do you want to tell people who perhaps haven't met anyone who's trans, who perhaps lawmakers that are trying to make decisions about this what do you wish they they knew that you know

um i wish it i don't really get the question like yeah this is you know how i was just telling you how in georgia right now they're trying to say that if you were born with boy parts, you have to play on boys' teams. If you're born with girl parts, you have to play on girls' teams. Yeah, yeah. What would you want to say to those people? What would you want to tell them? I would want to say no, they're wrong because it doesn't really matter what's under your clothes. I'm still a boy. I'm still a boy.

I'm like a boy born with girl pups. I don't want to be on a team with girls because I'll feel kind of alone. Even though I have people standing right next to me, I'd feel kind of alone still. When you look at these children, when you look at my son, you see that he is just a boy and a very happy boy at that. And it scares me to think about what his future holds for people when there are people out there who are ready at a moment's notice to to ban him from places to, you know, there are people who do moment's notice to ban him from places. There are people who do very terrible things to kill transgender people. When I look at my son, who is just this happy kid,

who is living this amazing life, I can't believe that there's somebody out there who wants to take that away from him. Hello? Hey, Marilyn. How you doing? Hi, Wendy. Do I need to keep saying producer?

People know you're the producer, yeah. People know, yeah. People know. How many citations in this week's episode? We have 189 citations. Oh, gee, 189. I know. We should have sprung for 200, huh? No. And if people want to see these citations, if they want to read anything about what we talked about on today's show, where should they go? They can look at the show notes and follow the links to the transcript.

And then there's a couple of announcements to make. Yeah. So one thing we wanted to shout out to was we talked to this parent of a gender diverse kid, Vanessa Ford, and she wrote this really cute book called Calvin about a kid who's trans. Yes. And just want to thank Vanessa for chatting with us and you should go check out her book, Calvin. Yep. And the other thing to shout out is that we've reached out to Joe Rogan and Abigail Schreier and they didn't get back to us. All right.

So thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne, Rasha Aridi, Akedi Foster-Keys, and me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Courtney Gilbert. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, fact-checking by Nick Delrose,

consulting by Rebecca Kling. Music written by Mr. Moo Minhaj, Leon Trapadera, Robbie Bold, and Lucas Zambargo. Thanks to all the experts we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. RJ Kavalyana Rastar, Dr. Jodie Herman and Tony Dorsey.

A very special thanks to all the trans kids and their parents that we heard from. Also, a big thanks to Crispin Torres, Alex Bloomberg, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next week.