Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright found himself the subject of censorship from Facebook-owned photo and video sharing app Instagram, where he posted information on a study from a major medical journal showing how biological men who identify as women have a natural advantage over biological women in multiple sports. His post was removed because it contained "hate speech."
According to the Daily Mail, Wright shared the study titled "Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage," which was published in Medicine & Sports in Sports & Exercise, which is a peer-reviewed science journal with roots dating back to 1969. Wright himself is a respected evolutionary biologist who was in academia for 12 years and has been published in the Wall Street Journal.
Wright posted on Instagram the groundbreaking study that was conducted by researchers at University of Manchester and Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm. The results of the study showed that biological males who identify as women still have a performance advantage over biological females across several Olympics-contested sports.
Another study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine titled "How does hormone transition in transgender women change body composition, muscle strength and haemoglobin? Systematic review with a focus on the implications for sport participation" showed similar results. This study was conducted by researchers at Loughborough University and Karolinska Institute, Stockholm.
Both these studies were published before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics took place, where several historic milestones for the LGBT community occurred. It was also the first time the Olympics had the most transgender athletes competing and featured the first openly transgender athlete to ever participate in an individual event.
Wright's Instagram post featured a scientific chart showing how males have a performance advantage over women from a study that tested if the International Olympic Committee's guidelines for transgender athletes eliminated the performance advantage of males over females naturally.
Each conclusion was clear, that despite even after three years of hormone therapy, transgender women still retain strength advantages over biological women, therefore concluding that this sets the stage for an uneven playing field in sports competitions.
The studies were conducted to determine if the IOC's criteria for athletes to be able to compete against women removes the performance advantages linked to biologically male bodies. Previously, the IOC declared that biological males who identify as females may compete against women in women's sports as long as their total serum testosterone levels are suppressed below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least a year before and during the competition.
The problem is that both studies showed that "reductions to strength, lean body mass, muscle size and bone density through the use of typical testosterone suppression regimes shows a minimal difference compared to the average difference between biological men and women, leaving them with a performance advantage." This means that evening out the playing field between men and women does not merely come down to testosterone levels.
Wright shared the illustration that showed the male performance advantage that cisgender men's bodies had compared to cisgendered women. He posted the image of the chart as an argument to defend "the reality of the two sexes" and that children should "compete in sports with their own sex." This did not sit well with Instagram.
Breitbart reported that Wright took to Twitter to share that Instagram took down his post because he allegedly violated its rules against "hate speech." The post that the Facebook-owned social media platform believed was "hateful" was merely an image from a scientific study that showed the advantage of biological males over females, which was determined through a scientific method, garnering it a fact.
