My comments on a review published in the 2020 by Hilton & Lundberg as a transgender woman, marathon & cross-country runner pre-transition, and student in the biology field.

The author took a stance supporting the restriction of transgender individuals from attending sports based on non-direct evidence of insufficiency of androgen suppression therapy in leveling the playfield in women’s sports. Despite the author’s claim and discussion on the need for further analysis of policies toward transgender participation in sports, this paper is widely used by people arguing for straight trans exclusion in sports.

I highly appreciate the author’s hard work in ensuring neutrality and open access of academic materials, and acknowledge that many ideas discussed in the paper could neither be scientifically proven or disproven due to limited evidence. Thus, I try to take a stance of pure academic review and follow the author’s style of providing opinions without spreading a propaganda when writing my comments. I also tried to minimize the inclusion of “my experience” in the comments due to the possibility of bias.