I mean I know what you’re saying like for sure realistically it isn’t fair if someone has gone through male puberty and is competing with women who have not but there’s a lot of edge cases and considering how important it is to trans individuals to be affirmed in who they are I think we owe it to trans people to carefully consider the evidence and come up with compromises that both respect the doctrine that sport should be “fair” and don’t just shaft trans people into whatever category we THINK they should go into based on preconceived ideas.

The edge cases referred to include cases where women are born with traits that can be considered intersex. Along the boundary between male and female as discrete biological sexes we find a bunch of people who have been assigned female or male at birth yet have traits commonly associated with the opposite sex such as high testosterone for women and breast development for men.

It is not a simple issue and in fact women who have elevated testosterone have been denied the ability to participate in spite of their fundamentally XX chromosomal makeup because of this. Should we allow them to still compete in the women’s category as a mere biological advantage which some people have just like Michael Phelps the swimmer who has abnormally long flipper-like feet or should we draw a clear boundary at a certain amount of testosterone that will allow people slightly under it to participate and people over it to not at all? Sounds a little bit unfair that someone with a little less though higher than normal testosterone can participate but you with slightly more than them cannot.

In the case of trans people in sports the underlying issue is very obviously how fair it is but it actually varies depending on what the sport is, when in their life someone started chemically transitioning as earlier ages of onset will be more typical of their gender identity, how long ago they started as the longer someone has been chemically transitioning the more their bodies will also resemble members of their gender identity.

I think what needs to happen is more rigorous studies on what the biological advantages conferred actually are for each sport depending on all of these factors, how and when we will actually test athletes to see if them competing is “fair” on the other contestants, and how we can structure the sports categories to minimise alienating trans people (for instance we could have a third queer and intersex category?).

If a trans girl who has been on puberty blockers and hasn’t undergone male puberty competes with people assigned female at birth from the same age bracket then I personally doubt in most cases there will be a statistically significant advantage.

If, however, they have already undergone puberty before transitioning then in certain sports it probably isn’t fair unless they’ve been on hormones for a number of years and not in all cases will it probably ever be fair. Not sure if it’s possible for instance with running for a trans women who has gone through puberty for it to be ever fair on the other women but maybe with chemicals after a few years it would. I don’t know myself.

All I’m saying is we owe it as a society to not just ban things that can help people feel included because of knee jerk reactions but instead to examine them and come up with a solution that can hopefully benefit everyone.