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While a Dane and a Slovene cycle up and down across France, the leadership of cyclings governing body, Managment Committee of the UCI, has decided that trans women aren't permitted to compete with cis women.
Leadership justified this step by claiming science can't currently prove a trans woman with 2.5 nmol/L testosterone enjoys no advantage for going through male puberty. Further and more harmful to cause of trans activists, it also claimed that presently science can't disprove that the shape and arrangement of the bones in their limbs may provide a lasting benefit to trans women.
The previously mentioned Science refers to a document by prof. Xavier Bigard: The current knowledge on the effects of gender-affirming treatment on markers of performance in transgender female cyclists (PDF).
The document contains data which is of interest even to those indifferent to the trans debate. On page 2 the gap in perfomance between men and women in different sports it neatly demonstrated. In rowing, swimming and running men are 10% better, while in pitch from baseball or a drag flick from field hockey the stronger sex is 60% superior.
Cycling rides over the footsteps of track field in drawing such a thick line between trans and cis women. As the linked article shows, experts in scientifical fields studying such matters, are expected to disagree with this decision. Likewise objections from human rights groups such as the ACLU are probably on the horizon.
So while trans activists enjoy unimpeded advances in gaining the right to access to children without their parents consent, they suffer setbacks in the field of female sports. Those opposed to the trans activist cause probably derive only hollow pleasure of "your rules, applied fairly" as sincere concern for competitors in a handicap category isn't their true motivation.
A less important decision also made by the UCI, was renaming "Men" to "Men/Open".
Honestly, they should make the men's competition the 'open' competition in all sports. All trans can join the open comp. Then the trans can argue how it's not fair for transmen to compete whatever. Has this been tried? To what effect?
They don't want open categories and they especially don't want to compete with/against men. They want access to the women's categories because "trans women are real women" and putting them in with the men is transphobic, you're saying they're really men.
Until we get competitors who have been on puberty blockers since they turned twelve and then straight onto HRT and surgery as soon as legally old enough, we won't get equal comparison data between trans women and cis women. Because to date, we have "went through natal puberty and transitioned late in life/only two years ago" and in photos those cyclists are visibly taller, longer limbed, male-bodied (even with artificial breasts) and generally "yeah, I can see why you came in first half an hour before the rest of the field".
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