Well, yeah. Adipocytes multiply when you get fat. But when you lose weight, they don't apoptose, they just shrink in volume by giving up their lipid stores.
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Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.
For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
Similar advantage is conveyed to athletes who had elevated (~male) testosterone levels in the past, even if they subsequently take blockers / go on HRT to ~female hormone levels.
Additionally, trans women on HRT typically have their T suppressed below standard cis women levels, and thus well below the levels of cis women athletes (the top levels in any sport by definition tending to be outliers in performance).
The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.
> If the net effect were actually an advantage, you'd expect the womens' sports which are allowing trans women to be dominated by them, but they really just aren't.
My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
It might or might not help, but if it were a net benefit then you'd expect trans women runners to perform more strongly than they actually do.
> My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
This sentence seems to presuppose that trans women are men. There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there. To me, the sensible conclusion seems to be that trans women perform roughly on par with cis women, not that cis women perform roughly on par with cis men.
> There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there.
I think there are maybe two things I'd poke at here. (1) Sports where transwomen enjoy greater advantage are more likely to have already excluded transwomen from womens' fields. And (2) the number of transwomen is tiny to begin with and AFAIK they have lower rates of participation in sports than ciswomen.
I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.
Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.
I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,
* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".
On the contrary, Laurel Hubbard is a good example of how apparent this male physical advantage is when male athletes are allowed to compete in the female category.
Here's a chart showing ranked lifts for both men's and women's weightlifting in the World Masters Games, where Hubbard won a gold medal in the women's category in 2017: https:/i.ibb.co/WWf7CMQD/hubbard.jpg (the source of this graph is a developmental biologist who, amongst other things, studies sex differences in sport).
This shows that the set of lifts by female and male weightlifters are entirely distinct. Hubbard falls within the middle range of the male rankings and is a huge outlier compared to the female rankings.
For the Olympics, if Hubbard had been female, qualification for the competition would have been unprecedented. Hubbard was competing in the wake of an earlier elbow injury, had taken a years-long career break, and was considerably older than any female weightlifter ever to qualify for Olympic weightlifting: female weightlifters peak at around age 26 and Hubbard was 43 years old at the time.
Being male in the female category was sufficient to mitigate all the effects of older age, chronic injury, undertraining, and - compared to other males - lack of world class talent.
It's also worth noting that Hubbard came last at the Olympics due to being disqualified for improper technique, not because of being unable to physically manage the lifts.