EUBC President Dr. Ioannis Filippatos clarifies the scientific impossibility of fair competition of transgenders within women’s sports
PhilBoxing.com
Tue, 11 Feb 2025
Lausanne, Switzerland – Today’s world is full of double standards, be it politics, daily life or even sports. The latter is especially unfortunate because people designed sports centuries ago to resolve conflicts peacefully and establish a fair platform for determining the best.
These days we faced the situation when there is no fairness in sports, as people try to cheat here and there. For years, we have been fighting against doping and now we face a new challenge - people making a gender transition. It might definitely be assessed as cheating, if you carefully examine the facts. As a medical doctor, I can confidently state that no hormone therapy, surgery or other form of manipulation can fully eliminate one’s sex attributes and advantages given by nature once we are born.
Gender is determined at conception and thus hormonal changes and their decisions occur in an organism from the moment it is a fetus in the mother. Although it is not widely known, every man has three adolescences, as boys are exposed to testosterone three times in their lives, starting from the womb, when the genitals are differentiated, secondly, short after birth, and the third and final time is normal puberty from 8 to 18 years.
A person born with XY chromosome in their 23rd pair can never change their bone structure, muscles‘ susceptibility to exercise, as well as the brain‘s area size dominance. All these factors undeniably play a pivotal role in sports. No hormone therapy, including testosterone suppression, can completely rebuild one’s body structure and exclude all possible advantages. Which, in turn, means that holding at least some male characteristics given at birth, a transitioned person competing in female category can have unfair advantage over female athletes.
We speak mostly about men transitioned into women, who seek opportunities to compete against females, than women transitioned to men. That fact, in turn, may well be another indicator that these female-born athletes who went through transition, even after testosterone therapy do not have enough characteristics to be truly competitive and have advantages over male rivals. Hence, while men’s sport has potentially no issues, women’s sport is truly in danger. One of the most vulnerable disciplines would be combat sports, where every tiny advantage matters and, moreover, can be dangerous.
Nobody denies that whatever one’s gender identification is, a person has their basic human right to practice sports. By limiting a person from competing in another category, we do not violate their right to practice sports but ensure fair conditions for other participants.
What would be a truly fair divide into categories? The one and only: male competing against male, female against female. Full stop. No other options. How do we identify a man and a woman? The only thing that makes a physical difference between the sexes is Y-chromosome. Hence, we write it down: XY goes for men, XX for women.
EUBC President Dr. Ioannis Filippatos.
Here are some more facts supporting this statement. The dimorphism in strength in humans is significant. A man, compared to an average woman, has:
• 57% greater grip strength,
• 65% greater leg strength,
• 90% more upper body strength,
• 162% more punch power.
Every man around us, even the completely untrained, has more punch power than 99% of women.
In fact, gender differences are not limited to muscle but also to physiology. So, men have:
• 45% more fat free mass and 30% less fat;
• Men’s long bones are over 10% longer;
• Men’s tendons are over 83% stronger and are 40% more powerful;
• In the other organs, men can use up to 50% more oxygen.
Men also have 50% better lung ventilation and 43% stronger heart (pulse volume). These differences end up giving them better performance in all sports, which on average exceed 10% in the worst case and reach up to 50%. To understand what this difference means, the average height difference between men and women is only 7%, and you see in the real world what a difference of that little 7% makes.
When people go through gender transition, they cannot change their chromosome set. This is what stays with us forever and helps us determine unfair advantage; XY shouldn’t compete against XX.
One can ask, if a transgender athlete who goes from male to female decreases their testosterone to low levels, would all of the above be reversed? The answer is the same for each point: NO.
While it makes it crystal clear with transgenders in boxing - not possible - there is one more condition to describe, and of course I mean DSD people, which stands for Differences of Sex Development. I cannot agree more, this is a complex question with its many variations, including extremely rare with only a few cases registered.
Having said that, interests of our boxers and their well-being have always been our core priority. If any of DSD variations can give an unfair advantage and put others in danger, we shouldn’t allow that. Which was the situation back in 2022 and 2023, when we saw two controversial cases. Without going into private information field and medicine details, both boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were deemed “NON-ELIGIBLE” according to eligibility criteria. Full stop. Cannot be reversed.
Now, we come to the interesting question: to ensure fair competitions, do we divide people in sports by their passport or by their physical characteristics, for instance, chromosomes that cannot be changed? While the IBA goes the scientific way, some other organisations choose to follow the easiest one and blindly believe anything what is on paper.
If not us, who will protect our women in sports? It’s time we stood up and said it out loud: No Men in Women’s Sport (thanks President Trump for a good motto).
To reiterate, existing research shows that while testosterone suppression affects biology, the changes it creates are minimal compared to the original biological differences between typical males and typical females, meaning that both biological traits and performance differences they are maintained even after years. Even if we were to completely reverse the effects of adolescent testosterone on physiology, neither average height nor bone length, which are of great importance in sports, could be reversed.
While in some countries people are free to choose their gender and identify themselves as they feel comfortable, they cannot choose their sex at birth. This should be a basic and minimum criteria to ensure fairness, and IBA has always been at forefront of it.
Once we saw the world split into two parts: one side supported IBA in its strong stance on gender eligibility, and the other was not convinced enough. Now, when the USA and President Donald Trump made a huge stride forward to protect girls and women’s sport, many more people see how right IBA was at the time. As a matter of fact, IBA has always been right because there was no other interest involved but to put our boxers first – fair and safe competition.
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