.jpg)
.svg)
The podium of the Official Strongman Games World Championships 2025 has become the epicenter of a global storm following the dramatic disqualification of the presumed World's Strongest Woman champion, Jammie Booker. Just days after her stunning victory in Arlington, Texas, organisers revoked her title, a move that has thrust the fraught debate over transgender athletes in women's sports into the global spotlight once more. The core question remains starkly simple: in a sport defined by raw, absolute strength, where does the line between inclusion and competitive fairness lie?
The controversy erupted on Tuesday, November 27th, when Strongman Corporation, the event's governing body, announced Booker’s disqualification. The organisation stated they were "being informed" that the champion, an athlete who identifies as female, was "biologically male" and had violated the competition’s stringent trans-exclusionary policy. This rule explicitly dictates that "competitors can only compete in the category for the biological sex recorded at birth." Officials clarified that had they been aware of Booker's history, she would not have been permitted to enter the Women's Open category at all. Booker, a personal trainer and professional strongwoman who had never publicly addressed her gender identity before the event, was consequently stripped of her win.
The immediate beneficiary of the ruling is Great Britain’s Andrea Thompson, the former world champion who had initially placed second. Thompson’s visible frustration on the podium, captured in a viral clip where she appeared to storm off the stage declaring the situation "bull***t," now seems an impassioned protest validated by the organisers' decision. Thompson later described the delayed victory on social media as being "overshadowed by scandal and dishonesty," reflecting the sentiment of many cisgender competitors who felt the integrity of their category had been undermined.
This incident immediately draws focus to the biological realities of strength sports. Despite some research suggesting a reduction in muscle mass and aerobic capacity after hormone therapy, strength—the very essence of this competition—is an area where the residual effects of male puberty are intensely debated. Studies have indicated that even after one to two years of testosterone suppression, the muscle mass and strength retained by transgender women typically fall somewhere between that of cisgender women and cisgender men, often resulting in a superior absolute handgrip strength compared to cisgender women. These residual effects, including unalterable differences in bone structure and body size achieved during male puberty, are significant factors in a sport like strongman where sheer physical size and lever length play a crucial role in performance.
Strongman Corporation emphasized that while the competition remains inclusive to all, it is their "responsibility to ensure fairness" by categorizing athletes based on their sex recorded at birth. This firm stance aligns with a growing number of international federations that have recently prioritized biological sex categories to protect competitive fairness in women’s divisions, particularly in power and contact sports where strength differences are most pronounced.
The case of Jammie Booker, whose history reportedly includes a presence in adult entertainment and a 2017 YouTube video discussing her experience as a trans woman, highlights the conflict between an athlete's personal journey and the rules of a sex-segregated sport. The controversy underscores a critical moment for strength sports, forcing a confrontation between the noble pursuit of universal inclusion and the foundational premise of fair competition established by the historical separation of men's and women's categories. The athletic community now watches to see if other governing bodies will follow Strongman Corporation’s decisive action or seek a more nuanced policy to balance the scales of this divisive issue.
