This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.

There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.

Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.

Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.

I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.

I am not describing myself. I just understand the position of people that feel that way and don't like to just dismiss them as bigots as most seem to.

These people are definitely making a slippery slope argument but they also feel like they're already halfway down the slope. They aren't out there seeing an A and concerned about B, they see it as A, B, C, D, E then F and wonder when G will come.

The trans sports thing is F. They're more worried about G, H and I.

>Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.

That's my point. If all I ever wanted to do was play basketball but I can't because of [accident of birth], which accidents require accomodations?

It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball so more people down the height distribution curve can compete at the higher levels. That would be, with the same logic as the exclusion of trans people, equitable. But we kind of instinctively know it's wrong.

Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.

It is a problem - see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of actual women who have been pushed out of winning spots in their sports by men who identify as women.

That's a matter of perspective, a perspective that is the core of this issue. Everything you've said after that is all true if you agree with your priors but people aren't asking you to defend that part, they're asking you to defend your priors, that gender identity is what's important in the segregation of sports and not biological sex.

An enormous part of this discussion has to do with Title IX, generally considered a positive thing among women's rights advocates. It's language deals with sex, the biological term, of male and female (as do many laws).

> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Behind all the people on both sides of this argument about what's a man and what's a woman there's the legal issue that it likely (I'm being generous is not saying definitely) violates Title IX to allow males into female sports (in the areas where T9 has authority).

> It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball...

This is another framing situation. I'd argue that the better analogy would be weight classes in wrestling. Classes work really well in individual sports to sort people into competitive groups and it works because it's an objective measure.

Unfortunately, team sports like basketball don't have enough players to form a different team for every "height class" so biological females, who tend to be shorter for the majority of the distribution curve, are basically guaranteed excluded by accident of birth. So team sports are segregated by biology because almost an entire sex, 50% of the population, is excluded by the distribution curves of their biology so we now have "sex classes" in most sports to serve the two major distribution curves of humans. Getting rid of sex segregation in basketball and doing so by height instead would make a lot of sense if height was the only factor but there's an equivalent set of distribution curves for things like strength, weight, speed, et al. that it's much simpler to take the thing that those curves have in common, sex, and segregate by them. And back to the previous paragraph, that's why wrestling is still also sex segregated.

I understand that argument and, I think, the sex segregation is a logical solution to the sexual dimorphism of humanity.

I also understand the argument that the social issue of a male/female sexes not being neatly segregated into gender identities, that people generally (also not always) want to segregate themselves, socially, with those people who share a common identity and that includes sports, especially lower levels, that are generally much more social functions than athletic. What I don't see coming from this side of the argument is a defined set of rules that can replace the language of Title IX. Which is totally understandable because gender is exponentially more complicated and diverse than sex. I'm onboard with doing something about this but I've yet to see an understandable replacement for something like Title IX that uses gender over sex.

I have a bit of curiosity about the idea of "identity" being something worthy of segregation considering that gender identity isn't the only type of identity categorization.

I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.

Only recently has it become clear that about 2 years of HRT eliminates competitive advantage for endurance sports, but that no amount of HRT seems to erase the competitive advantage in power sports of trans women who have gone through male puberty (MMA, power lifting, etc.).

There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special? I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU

Yes, testosterone is special because it's a huge advantage. Like, the next closest factor doesn't even come close across most sports. Some women who were born female have naturally high testosterone levels and are barred from competing in women's categories.

> I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU

Yes, I've seen it, and it does do a good job. Notice the argument being made:

1. Sports is entertainment.

2. Sports is entertaining to the extent that the outcome is unpredictable.

3. We keep it unpredictable by establishing fairness so no one has privileged knowledge of the outcome.

The extreme examples she cites of unfairness were not entertaining exactly because the outcome was predictable. Given sports is to be entertaining due to unpredictability, preserving fairness is critical.

Do you have numbers on that? Specifically, that the average transwoman athlete moves neither up nor down in her rankings compared to when she was a man? My personal exposure is purely anecdotal, but I have never heard of someone performing worse against women than they did against men unless they also changed their preferred sport at the same time.

What I will say is that I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers is mostly driven by those that can gain political capital from it.

If we can look at the data and say that transitioning and playing against women doesn't result in a relative performance increase vs the average athlete in the field, that's a strong argument that it's not unfair to let trans athletes compete against women. If we look at the data and see that "men who perform at the 60th percentile level among men perform after their transition at the 80th percentile among women" that's an indicator there remains an unfair advantage and our medical technology for transition needs to improve before trans athletes can fairly compete against women.

You wouldn't make this point about most other unchanging factors (i.e. genetics) that affect performance either. "Fairness" in high end sports is extremely subjective, and hard work is only a small part of how successful you can be, with time (which usually equals to wealth; poor people can't afford to not work) and genetics being the most important. It's simply not a meritocracy in the first place.

"It's already unfair so there's no reason to care about it being unfair" is not a good argument.

the relative increase in performance would not displace anyone with a shot at winning.

Without data we have no way of knowing that. If that's true, we can prove it and put to rest the controversy.

I refuse to acknowledge this as controvercy that requires this kind of addressing.

That's certainly a large percentage of the motivation, granted. I do think a salient point is that there's nobody lobbying to make it unfair in some other way. If there were groups successfully lobbying to, say, abolish weight classes or allow the use of some expensive performance enhancement like a heads-up display, people would also oppose it.

>the advantage could not be that extradordinary

Look up the world records or current ranking for male and female athletes for any sport

And please, stop pretending like trans women and cis men are a 1:1 comparison. We have trans athletes. Use them - in aggregate and not with an anecdote - to make your comparisons and you'll see it's pretty much a normal distribution of performance. In fact, you're making my point for me, because even the most salient of examples still get beaten by cis women. That wouldn't happen if we had this immense disparity.

Laurel Hubbard (MtF) was on New Zealand's Olympic weightlifting team. An Indigenous Maori girl missed out because of that.

There's countless examples of athletes who were totally uncompetitive as males, suddenly becoming elite-level after transitioning. If that doesn't say male advantage I don't know what does.

But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.

Ah yes, the penises and their unashamed wielders, large 6'1" men, exposing their meat to the elements. It reminds me of homophobes being uncomfortable sharing the looker room with an openly gay person. Should we also concern ourselves with the women still uncomfortable sharing a changing room with "colored" people?

(You named two, but you forgot to mention Lia is still very regularly beaten and Laurel placed last in her group at those Olympics, in a weight class that had most countries not even send a competitor.)

The single biggest genetic difference among humans is the presence of a Y chromosome.

This single casual factor, not "testosterone levels" nor "height" nor "bone density" nor "muscle mass", is the best factor to split on.

Accordingly, the women's division at the Olympics should be based on this factor.

(There are potentially still edge cases, but neither trans people nor even the "46X,Y DSD" individuals mentioned above are the edge cases.)

That is actually incorrect. You can be born with a Y chromosome and zero functional testosterone[1]. There are a lot of moving parts in between having a Y chromosome and getting testosterone expression. The later of which is a much better discriminator.

And also, these deviations aren't rare. Though they are usually unknown, when they don't cause obvious developmental deviation (and thus labeled DSDs). They also are more common in some populations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivit...

The intersex athletes support this claim because, although their condition is "natural" in your sense, they are in fact being banned from participation in women's sports. For example, the various individuals mentioned above are restricted from participating in distances from 400m to a mile, including in particular 800m! (Thus they have switched to other distances, but the bans are likely to extend there too.)

Let's be honest, that's what most of these bills are marketing themselves on.