Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast with the program that looks at the numbers in the news, in life and in systematic reviews.

I'm Charlotte MacDonald.

The Winter Olympics finished a couple of weeks ago in Italy, and apart from a few mixed-team events, for the most part, men competed against men and women competed against women.

Generally in sport, that is what we consider fair, because as the game showed, men are faster, more powerful and have greater endurance.

But increasingly in sport, there's a controversy about transgender women, people who are born male and now identify as women.

Is it fair for them to compete against women, or do they have an advantage?

A recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has weighed into this debate. Here's the headline from their press release.

Physical fitness of transgender and cisgender women is comparable, current evidence suggests.

The study uses the term cisgender to differentiate women who were born female from transgender women who were born male.

The study has been written up in online news stories with headlines like this.

Trans women in sport have no advantage over cis women, study finds.

But is this what the study in question really found?

Tom Coles has been looking into this one. Hi Tom.

Hello.

Let's start with the big picture here.

The reason men and women don't compete against each other in sport is because that wouldn't be fair.

On account of physical differences between the sexes, right?

Yeah, that's right. So let me just introduce Professor Alan Williams,

a sports scientist from Manchester Metropolitan University.

And let's start with that thing you mentioned,

the male advantage in sport.

There's a mountain of existing evidence before this paper appeared

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