i'm not a sports fan. i think competition is barbarism and sports don't belong in the schools. parents that want their kids to play sports should pay out of pocket to have them play in private sector leagues, after school. it should be against the law to remove your kids from class to compete in sports games.
i did not play sports in high school. i didn't even take phys ed as a class.
for that reason, i am not particularly interested in either side of the trans sports debate. i don't actually really care. however, to the extent that the issue exists and lingers to exist, it should be determined by science and not by prejudice or be driven by ignorance. there is a broad cultural problem in the united states that is worst amongst genetic women, exists in both parties and leads people to ignorant positions about trans people. in the recent weeks and months, many democrats made a lot of ignorant statements about transgendered women in sports.
the science really doesn't support the idea of gender as a segregating factor in sports in the first place. gender is sometimes correlated to more important factors, like weight or height. when you control for these more important factors, gender has no predictive advantage in determining competitive outcomes. for example, in swimming, the dominant factor is height. men are often taller than women (which is itself not genetic, but tied to nutrition in childhood). when you control for height, gender provides for no advantage in swimming competitiveness.
conversely, when you control for gender, height presents itself as an unfair advantage. should women over a certain height be banned from competing?
gender is an arbitrary metric that isn't the most important factor. that it has been made an important factor is mostly the result of ignorance, but also the result of snowflake culture. ciswomen like to think they're special. it's a broader problem.
it may consequently be more helpful to abolish gender as a category in swimming competitions and instead move to co-ed competitions that have different pools based on height. the tallest pools may be mostly men, but also include taller women that easily defeat the shorter women and face stiffer competition from men. the shortest pools may be mostly women and include some shorter men that couldn't compete with the tall ones. the middle heights would be co-ed and mixed.
if you want to follow the science, that's what it would tell you - that gender is not an advantage in swimming, it's irrelevant, and you should split people up by a more relevant characteristic, specifically height.
other sports would have weight as a more defining characteristic.
when it comes to high school kids who have barely gone through puberty, or gone through it at all, and who don't do specialized training, it's not clear what the point is at all. all high school aged sports leagues should be entirely, completely co-ed. there's no scientific basis for concluding 14 year old boys are stronger or faster than 14 year old girls and the data wouldn't uphold it. in fact, because girls tend to go through puberty at a younger age, they may actually have a limited competitive advantage in some sports, like short distance running.
the argument that cisgirls can't compete against transgirls isn't just ignorantly anti-trans, it's ignorantly misogynist, too. it's not based in science. it's not based in data. the types of skinny, unmasculine, pre-pubescent transgirls we're talking about are going to, on average, get their asses kicked by mature girls that went through puberty young. the science suggests the transgirls should be at a competitive disadvantage, pre-puberty.
that being said, transgendered athletes should be tested for drugs like any other. the only science based considerations have to do with testosterone levels. young boys and young girls should have comparable testosterone levels, until the boys get to puberty. the boys don't have a competitive advantage if they have comparable testosterone levels. but the trans kids should be on blockers to identify as trans kids.
i would not oppose testing trans kids for testosterone and estrogen levels. that's science, that's important, that matters - to an extent, in limited contexts. if a kid claims to be transfemale, they can't have off the charts testosterone levels. that is fair. but the sex organs don't matter.
definitions of gender in competitive sports when they matter (which is not often) should be hormone dependent and not sex dependent.
the girls category in high school sports is mostly not maintained for competitive reasons. the truth is that it's largely an anachronism from the days of girls-only and boys-only schools. we don't have black and white sports teams anymore, but we used to when we had black and white schools. are black people better at sports than white people? should we have whites-only leagues so the blacks don't outcompete the whites? the argument that boys are better at sports is really not any less dumb than the idea that blacks are better at sports than whites. it has some limited truth, but it's due to unrelated factors being correlated with race/gender rather than race/gender themselves. those independent factors should be decoupled from the inherent qualities to get to better defined competitive categories.
but, girls like being snowflakes. they like being special and different. that's how we raise girls, and it's what this is really about, not competitive fairness, which is just blatant misogyny. it's bizarre to hear so many young ciswomen stand up and loudly state they can't compete with men. in my day, those girls would get laughed out of the room. nowadays, they are told they are snowflakes, and have that inverted misogyny reinforced by the dominant culture, which wants them to be the weaker sex.
in fact, it's often the parents that say that, not the kids. right? their little princess will always be a special snowflake, to them. but that can't be public policy.
so, what i would support is :
(1) no public funding for school sports. it should be strictly private sector and only after school.
(2) it should be illegal to take boys or girls out of class for sports.
(3) children's sports leagues should be 100% co-ed (pre-puberty). gender segregation in sports should be against the law. i played co-ed soccer when i was a young kid. the girls weren't at a competitive disadvantage, and they would have punched you in the face if you said they were.
(4) adolescent and adult sports leagues should base their segregated categories on measurably relevant categories like height and weight and not on irrelevances like birth sex. depending on the context, it may be relevant to screen for testosterone levels, but not for chromosomes or sex organs.
(5) to the extent that gender sometimes needs to be defined in a sports context, it should be defined by hormone ranges and not by genetics or birth sex.
