For Women Scotland Sport

Just rereading through "Joanna" Harper's infamous study on male performance on hormones and I can't believe this was ever allowed to be published. (Harper is a man pretending to be a woman who runs in women's races himself. He has stole several national championship medals.) Harper collected times from 8 different men over 7 years. All times were self-reported and self-selected. Only 6 of the 8 had times that could be verified and even then less than half of those times could be verified. So already, we have a sample size too small to be meaningful and men who could pick and choose their times (it would be simple to just provide times from a bad race day) which were not able to be verified. Okay. Runner 7 markedly improved his times, dropping almost an hour off his marathon. Harper threw out the rest of his times, declaring him an "outlier." Is it possible to have an outlier with a sample size of 8? We learn that Runner 4 had several injuries and his training suffered, and Runner 5 experienced a large weight gain and lost motivation to train. Runner 6 provided a male time from when he was 24 years old. His "female" time came from a race when he was 53. All times from the "female" races occurred when the participants were older than the times from "male" races. Harper says the runners reported "relatively stable" training habits, but does not specify what those habits are or give any indication that the training habits were recorded at any point or verifiable in any way. He claims that the race times worsened "significantly" after the men started using wrong-sex hormones, but the largest difference in 5k times, for example was around four minutes. A quick glance at several random athletic.net profiles shows that high school cross country runners who have incredibly consistent training (with a coach, no less) can have 5k times that fluctuate between 1 to 3 minutes on average between two months. Harper is taking times from different years from recreational athletes who do not have consistent training regimes. At the end of the study Harper claims that, despite having 1 man who got faster, 2 men who got worse due to injury and weight gain, and 5 men who all got slower as they aged, had no verifiable training regimes, and submitted self-selected times that demonstrated a typical fluctuation in running time, that the study makes "it possible to state that transgender women run distance races at approximately the same level, for their respective gender, both before and after gender transition." He also says that the study "makes a powerful statement" to support the idea that "it is fair to allow to transgender women to compete against 46,XX women in all sports" Meanwhile, I've got a sample size of over 600 hundred saying otherwise... researchgate.net/publication…