Transgender women in archery: Hamilton 2021 review

The review offers international federations a method for deciding whether and when transgender women may compete in the female category, and applies it to archery and shooting. The method is a triangle of three priorities, fairness, inclusion and safety, plus a scale for weighting them sport by sport, modelled on the process followed by World Rugby, which had put safety first.

To gauge how much sex matters for performance, the authors compare men's and women's records. In archery, across 13 world, Olympic and Paralympic records, women score on average 1.46% below men, with differences ranging from -4.21% to +0.86%; in shooting the mean is -0.84%, but over a much wider range, from -8.11% to +5.26%. These gaps are far smaller than the 11-13% quoted for endurance sports like running, rowing and swimming. On the effects of hormone therapy, the studies cited, all in non-athletes, indicate that after 12 months the losses of muscle mass and strength are still partial, while in a group of 46 US military personnel the initial advantage over women in push-ups and sit-ups had gone after 24 months; visuospatial ability, on the other hand, does not appear to change with therapy. The final proposal is to admit transgender women to elite archery after 2 years of therapy, against the 12 months World Archery required at the time, and to shooting after 1 year.

It is a narrative review. The first author searched for studies published up to 15 February 2021 in PubMed, Embase, SportDiscus and Google Scholar, using keywords on transgender people, archery, shooting and performance, and added studies found in reference lists; the number of studies found or excluded is not reported. The records come from the websites of World Archery and the international shooting federation, and for each event the difference is calculated as the women's score minus the men's, divided by the men's. For archery there are 7 world records (barebow, recurve, compound over various distances and arrow counts) and 6 Olympic and Paralympic records. The authors chose records rather than the average of the top eight in the world ranking because they represent the best ever achieved by men and by women.

There are no data on transgender women in archery or shooting, as the authors are the first to say: every conclusion runs through studies of non-athletes and through reasoning about strength, oxygen and visuospatial ability, none of it measured on shooting. The step from military push-ups to drawing a bow is also an analogy made by the authors. Records are a single number per event, sometimes from different years, and in one compound record the women's score is higher than the men's. The explanations offered for the male advantage in archery (more strength, faster arrows that are therefore less affected by wind, more haemoglobin) are hypotheses, not findings.

There are also errors of detail: the standard deviation of the archery differences is 1.38% in the table but 0.86% in the text, which seems to confuse it with the end of the range, and the archery records table credits its data to the athletics federation. How to weight fairness, inclusion and safety is a sporting policy choice, and the authors themselves write that it belongs to the federations.

For archers, the most concrete point in the study sits to one side of its main subject: in archery records the gap between men and women is small, 1.46% of the points on average, much less than in sports where endurance or power counts. It is a descriptive point about records, not a measure of what individual archers can do.

On the eligibility of transgender women the study decides nothing: it proposes a way of reasoning and a two-year threshold of therapy for archery, built on indirect evidence and described as provisional until data are collected on transgender women who shoot. Eligibility rules are set by the federations, and this paper is a contribution to the debate, not a regulation.