Here is the study itself
Should address some of your questions I think
@El Guapo
just read it out of curiosity It's mostly behind a pay wall and I would have significant reservations
here is the conclusion
While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.
You'd need to read how they normalised the outcome of the 50 studies.
But basically this conclusion is that the data around untrained Trans Women is comparable to untrained Women with a low degree of certainty
What the IOC study tells us as well as every other cited study that I have seen is I can take those trans Women in one group and train them, and those women in another group and train them and the median performance difference between the groups would be 10-12% in aerobic events, 20% in strength events and up to 100% in power and collision sports.
This is before we get into height, limb length, elasticity and bone density.
Inclusion is a Noble aspiration but we are moving past a point of debate into one of scientific consensus on this.
wouldn't it be wonderful if we could take a pill and even out performance between the sexes? but unfortunately we can't because of the clear retained male advantage and there are very few dissenting scientific voices any more.
if the author now has any credibility in his own research he would used the study to fund legitimate scientific testing and move beyond meta analysis and directly test his conclusions.
My hypothesis is he will find the IOC to be correct
