Honestly though the question around sports fairness is less a problem raised by trans people and more just an existing issue exposed. Female and male bodies work differently on average but there are a good number of women more fit and physically capable than 99% of men - gender is not an independent variable in physical fitness but I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.

> I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.

The world champion team of female soccer gets beat by a boys under 15 high school team https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...

The 203rd male tennis player absolutely crushes the Williams sisters https://www.marca.com/en/more-sports/2017/06/27/595296da468a...

Women 100m record is 10.49. High-schoolers can run in 10.00 s https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Athlete.aspx?AID=1265... Men's record is under 10.

If you do away with the women leagues, you will see 99% males in almost all sports.

While we do have the special olympics, there are all sorts of classes of people who lack genetic traits to excel at sports and no allowance is made for them to compete within their own bracket - the only bracket we have is men and women.

I will admit that this is not a hill I'll die on though - I have almost no interest in sports as a profession so it's a fair bit out of my wheelhouse.

There is plenty of brackets so all can play at their respectives levels, separation in different leagues for collective sports, different levels in individual sports, etc. You can have fun in your local amateur <whatever>, but there would not be any point in a game against professionals. And at the top level, olympics or international competitions, there would be no match in mixed genders for most sports.

There are weight classes in weightlifting, boxing etc

Men would win every weight class due to stronger ski, connective tissues, different and more efficient bone structure...

Sports fairness is basically a transphobe dogwhistle at this point. Major athletic organizations already have policies in place that say that trans women can’t compete unless x,y,z criteria are met which is typically a minimum number of years on HRT and T levels not more than something.

The issue is that there is a trade-off being made here. A trans woman athlete likely has a better bone structure than the average cis woman but not better than the most naturally gifted cis female athletes. Athletic orgs have largely decided that this is fine and it’s not a significant enough advantage to care about because the question for them was “how can trans women compete” not “if trans women can compete.”

But then it’s such an easy issue to drive a wedge on because you can get people riled up about whether trans women should be able to compete with a sprinkling of misinformation about what HRT does and dash of “so a man can just say he’s a woman and compete.”

What about basketball as another example. Height is probably the single most important physical attribute of the game and the height advantage men have is overwhelming. HRT after puberty has no impact on height.

And in that situation you may have very real case for saying that women over a certain height shouldn't be allowed to play women's basketball. That's fine, it's really no different than weight classes in wrestling. But then a trans woman who is of average height for a female basketball player shouldn't be barred from playing.

However, the WNBA sports so many women who are 6'+ (tall people play basketball, go figure) with the tallest player ever being 7'2" so the range of heights of women is pretty broad.

You seem to not be taking into account that fact that on average trans women will be taller than cis women, not that every trans woman is taller than every cis woman. And when talking about a sport that naturally selects for people who are outliers in height a trans woman being 5'7 (taller than the average woman) will be one of the shorter players.

Even if you capped height, to say 6'8", you will still see likely eventually see trans women dominating the sport.

<i>You seem to not be taking into account that fact that on average trans women will be taller than cis women, not that every trans woman is taller than every cis woman.</i>

No, I am taking that into account. Because of how dominant height is in basketball, you rarely see men in the NBA at 5'9" (the average height for a man in the US). Probably less than .5% of the NBA is that height or less.

So in women's basketball what this means, even if you cap the height, you will see the average height in the league grow because of the addition of trans women. 6'3" point guards will become the norm -- as of today I don't think a single 6'3" PG exists in the WNBA. And almost all of the eventual 6'3" PGs will be trans women.

Whereever you cap the height -- that height will be dominated by transwomen.

The only way to really blunt the impact is to cap the height so low that there is a substantial pool of top talent from transwomen and cis. Something like 6'. But that ends up now drastically hurting a bunch of cis women who are tall and prior to this, this being the preferred sport for them. And the WNBA already has issues with popularity and comparisons to the mens game (although I perosonally really enjoy womens basketball) -- if they capped the height to 6', that just makes the problem worse.

Not just bones. Muscle mass and the rest doesn't just disappear. In the sport i do (rugby), it's been evaluated to be a danger to players (increased risk of injury), and i would wager most contact sports are similar.

Muscle mass does just disappear in the exact same way as it does when someone stops steroids. It’s not instantaneous which is why places require 12-24 months of constant hormones.

Also you picked the one single example where trans women have been sorta kinda banned with basically no concrete justification, caused the world to roast them publicly, and then clubs largely ignored them and came up with their own rules — like France and the US changed the requirements to time on HRT and T levels like every other sport and the UK did a height and weight limit which, while odd, is actually a lower bar than time on HRT.

Outright bans on trans women will basically never be necessary when HRT is so effective. If by some chance there is a sport where it’s not enough you can start imposing greater restrictions like requiring trans women reach a certain (low) weight to shed any pre-transition muscle.