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It's a minefield. At the moment, most public research is generated by folk with ulterior motives using deliberately skewed assumptions and comparisons. The ones that aren't lack sufficient data to show meaningful conclusions.
Joanna Harper is doing work in this space, but she's in the latter category.
Going off your hint, I found this review from Harper that is pretty interesting:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865.abstract
Like you said, there’s not enough to really form solid conclusions, but it’s a nice summary of the research.
It's a good example of the sort of thing I was talking about too.
That summary you linked to isn't measuring athletic ability but it will often be talked about as if it is. What they found was that lean body mass was different to cis women, and then they imply that it leads to athletic advantage, without ever actually exploring that part.
But on average, trans womens bodies and frames are larger than cis womens. Body mass scales in a roughly cubic correlation with body size, rather than a linear manner, so measures of lean body mass area don't mean much when they don't account for that. I have no idea of all of te measured studies do account for it, or if the meta study accounted for it.
Similarly, it mentions a difference in strength, but what is that difference? Is it upper body strength? Grip strength? Arm strength? And what impact does that different have on athletic ability? That's not explored.
Studies like this are important, but they are not the answers, because they don't actually assess the thing that's being talked about, which is athletic performance. What they do is look at measures in isolation, with no understanding of how that impacts overally athletic performance, particularly in trans bodies, in which assumptions about cis bodies simply may not apply.
Yet, despite that, they are used to exclude trans folk from sports.
It's like how I always noticed how, growing up, the tall people with long limbs were always stronger than short people with short limbs, weirdly regardless of how ripped the short kid was, within relative reasoning (like if the short person obviously was a bodybuilder and HUGE and the tall person never moved in their life). It's got to be a factor of leverage, and how base muscle you need to just function as a higher-leverage limbed person.
Like if you took a cis woman with a 22 inch long humerus and a trans woman with a 22 inch long humerus, and both had 15 inch biceps and have similar estrogens levels and testosterones levels, their bicep leverage strength (let's just assume same geometry ffs), I'm guessing, should be the same.
We're all just meat cyborgs, after all, and sports were never meant to be totally fair, they were meant to just play, and then Romans or whatever came along and had someone run a long ways and then the military was like HMMMMM and started encouraging finding capable soldiers through competition of measurement and assigning wealth or fame to the MOST X PEOPLE. It was never about who could do the most with the same, it was about simply who can do the most. And any semblance of "levelness" is a lie because the people who win these things are all just mutants pumped full of maximum resources and support anyway. It's all just commercials and circus competition. I'm not depressed and jaded with the state of the world, you are.
So, to conclude: fairness measurements in sports for people in sports is inherently misleading, and to try to measure that for trans people is, at best, convoluted past the point of pointless, it's an obfuscating smoke-show rabbit-hole of strawmen, red herrings, and other conservative traditionalist garbage fallacies by archaic aspects of civilization continuing the tradition of intrinsic performative pointlessness in unfortunately largely successful attempts to stay "relevant". Basically, we're all still apes, you get an amygdala response, and you get an amygdala response, the scientific method is only 100 years old, the modern Internet is less than 25 years old, most humans can't control their emotions, let alone be consistently well nourished... So expecting the main populace to care enough to learn about why gatekeeping trans people from BASICALLY ANYTHING is completely arbitrary is something we should do our best to accept and work around, kind of like realizing you have to outsmart a child rather than arguing with it. I say we make our own sardonic-as-plausible-deniability rhetoric smoke show about how Jesus has come to us and says that trans women don't have an advantage and to go against this word is to go against the word of God itself, and then secretly make a toaster template that toasts aigen long-hair white guy on bagels for religious authenticity and authority. I think the trick is if you have unlimited confidence, they have to believe and follow you, because evolution ~
It’s got to be a factor of leverage, and how base muscle you need to just function as a higher-leverage limbed person.
However, short limbed folk have an advantage in weight lifting, thanks to leverage. So whilst it makes sense that long limbed folk have more muscle mass to account for that, it gets interesting when you consider that trans women lose muscle mass with the loss of testosterone, and are moving those longer limbs around with reduced muscle mass, giving them the worst of both worlds.
they were meant to just play
Well sure, but you can't "just play" with people who dramatically outclass you. By and large, people who can't compete on equal footing with a sufficient number of peers tend to just not participate.
Yeah, if they compared similar sizes of cis and trans people it would be a better study.
Some of the other comments have mentioned Joanna Harper, who is trying, but lacks enough data to make meaningful conclusions.
I recently did a presentation on the political side of this, and one thing to note was that with 1 or 2 exceptions, not a single state legislator could identify an instance of a trans woman dominating her field (because the anti trans movement is astroturf and designed to prey on people's fear).
If you would like my sources for the presentation, DM me. I only had a couple on this subject, but some of the auxiliary sources might help too.
Here's an interesting article with a link to a report that covers many of the issues I mentioned in my earlier post