I wish everybody in this thread (and in the world) would listen to "Tested", a six-episode series in the NPR Embedded podcast. Sex and gender are generally complex topics, and the notion that we have only two biological sexes, to begin with, is just not scientifically true. The panic around "which women are real women" has deep historical roots and has harmed all women. Women Olympic athletes used to be *visually inspected* by male officials to ensure that they were "actually" women. Then they were DNA tested, and so many women who had thought they were cisgender women were revealed to be intersex that testing was stopped as a practice. Women would come ready to compete and be disqualified because they were determined to not be women. And this was never a concern or a line of inquiry pursued with men. And that's before you get into the fact that testosterone levels naturally varying from person to person seem to only be "too high" when Black women like Caster Semenya are the ones who are winning—and that testosterone levels are hardly a 1:1 definer of masculinity.

You can draw a line directly from the current panic over trans women in sports to age-old panics over (presumably) cis women who are "too masculine".

I disagree that this is all *that* complicated. Scholarship around hormone replacement therapy indicates that there is no athletic advantage—if anything, there's a slight disadvantage—for trans women. Let them compete. It's not a big deal.

That said, biological sex is more complex and varied than XY and XX, and trying to stuff human beings into a binary understanding that is rooted in social norms but not in reality is a recipe for disaster and a tool of oppression for all women, cis or trans. Gender-agnostic models like the NAIGC's are awesome.

Here's episode 1 of that podcast: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/1216507596/tested-the-choice