The mystery of testosterone and women’s sport
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Leading scientist labels the IOC’s focus on hormones in trans women as ‘simplistic’ and a ‘mess’.
By Fiona Thomas
When sports scientist Dave Hamilton set out to monitor the testosterone levels of an international women’s hockey team it was with the aim of measuring how the athletes were coping with their new heavier training load. Hamilton took three weeks’ worth of daily salivary samples from the players, one in the morning and one in the afternoon after physical activity. The study did not throw up any red flags around their training schedules, but it did yield some unexpected results.
‘What we found was that relative to a sedentary population, [the women] had high testosterone levels,’ said Hamilton, who now works in a similar high-performance role at Tampa Bay Buccaneers. ‘We also found the people who were on oral contraception, versus those who weren’t, had lower testosterone levels.’ In fact, women who weren’t on oral contraception had testosterone concentrations that were on ...
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