In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state. The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.
Conservatives around the country have jumped on the question. Attorney General Merrick Garland was pressed on the issue during his confirmation hearing last month. State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams. In describing the Connecticut case in the Wall Street Journal, opinion writer Abigail Shrier expressed a representative argument: when transgender girls compete on girls’ sports teams, she wrote, “[cisgender] girls can’t win.”
The opinion piece left out the fact that two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed by the cisgender girls’ families, one of those girls beat one of the transgender girls named in the lawsuit in a Connecticut state championship. It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth.
Policies permitting transgender athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity are not new. The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify. California passed a law in 2013 that allows trans youth to compete on the team that matches their gender identity; there have been no issues. U SPORTS, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S.’s National Collegiate Athletic Association, has allowed transgender athletes to compete with the team that matches their identity for the past two years.
The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.
Claiming that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in sports also neglects the fact that these kids have the deck stacked against them in nearly every other way imaginable. They suffer from higher rates of bullying, anxiety and depression—all of which make it more difficult for them to train and compete. They also have higher rates of homelessness and poverty because of common experiences of family rejection. This is likely a major driver of why we see so few transgender athletes in collegiate sports and none in the Olympics.
On top of the notion of transgender athletic advantage being dubious, enforcing these bills would be bizarre and cruel. Idaho’s H.B. 500, which was signed into law but currently has a preliminary injunction against its enforcement, would essentially let people accuse students of lying about their sex. Those students would then need to “prove” their sex through means including an invasive genital exam or genetic testing. And what happens when a kid comes back with XY chromosomes but a vagina (as occurs with people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome)? Do they play on the boys’ team or the girls’ team? This is just one of several conditions that would make such sex policing impossible.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.
Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.
Beyond the trauma of sex-verification exams, these bills would cause further emotional damage to transgender youth. While we haven’t seen an epidemic of transgender girls dominating sports leagues, we have seen high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide attempts. Research highlights that a major driver of these mental health problems is rejection of someone’s gender identity. Forcing trans youth to play on sports teams that don’t match their identity will worsen these disparities. It’s a classic form of transgender conversion therapy, a discredited practice of trying to force transgender people to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
Though this can be hard for cisgender people to understand, imagine someone told you that you were a different gender and then forced you to play on the sports team of that gender throughout all of your school years. You’d likely be miserable and confused.
As a child psychiatry fellow, I spend a lot of time with kids. They have many worries on their minds: bullying, sexual assault, divorcing parents, concerns they won’t get into college. What they’re not worried about is transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.
Legislators need to work on the issues that truly impact young people and women’s sports—lower pay to female athletes, less media coverage for women’s sports and cultural environments that lead to high dropout rates for diverse athletes—instead of manufacturing problems and “solutions” that hurt the kids we are supposed to be protecting.
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As a short man let me tell you how hilarious it is when people bitch about fairness in sports when it comes to transrights. Sports are not fair at all, they are literally a display of ableism. Transwomen deserve a spot on womens teams fullstop its not complicated.
Absolutely. Top sprinters have a whole different kind of muscle structure to the average person. I can train 24/7 for the rest of my life and I’m never going to develop a whole different muscle structure.
As a short person I could never be the best basketballer, and with shorter legs I’ll never be a hurdler.
Sport is always a good percentage “what you’re born with”.
Absolutely agreed! I’m a short trans guy, and I go swimming 4 times a week. Admittedly it’s not competitive, but the huge range in speed and stamina is just staggering. There’s women that are faster than me, or who can keep going longer. There’s men that are slower or have less endurance. Human beings are so incredibly varied, physically speaking, that the difference within groups is much greater than the difference between groups. In so many sports, an inch of extra height, or slightly longer arms, or slightly more flexible joints, or a slight variation in hormonal configuration, can all give someone a competitive edge. The only way to have truly fair sports is to only allow identical twins to compete against each other.
That said, I do accept the science that suggests 2+ years on HRT is a reasonably fair threshold when it comes to trans people, given what is known about testosterone’s effects on the body. It’s not a perfect solution, since 100% fairness is impossible, but it’s a compromise that has scientific backing, which is probably the best that can be asked for.
It really is interesting watching the mental gymnastics involved in ensuring ‘fairness’ in sport this one particular instance and no other. I’ve noticed that the people I encounter who feel the most strongly about this think of themselves as ‘big powerful men’. I’m not big, or particularly powerful, so it’s always been obvious to me that it’s basically a load of bull. There are plenty of women who could outperform me at any sport, and there always have been. Meanwhile I saw competitive cornhole on TV at a bar the other day and it was gender segregated. Wtf?
Transgender women athletics are facing a catch 22 situation: If they win it is becuz of their “biological sex” But if they lose then it is becuz of their harmful transition surgeries.
Either way there is a reason to hate them.
I got into a very strange argument with a relative (who doesn’t know any trans people -at least none they are aware of). They were absolutely convinced that ANY man is better than ALL women at all things. Athletic, intellectual, creative; men are inherently better at all of it.
Therefore, in their mind, anyone who was a man/boy at any point in their lives will be better at everything than a cis woman ever could be. So trans women will always dominate no matter what.
The profound misogyny at the base of their argument was flabbergasting.
@StringTheory @Five that’s something that some people do actually believe. it is scary that people like that run around, but every ones in a while you run into that sort of person.
Genuian question here, are there any studies on bone structure and joint strength of trans athletes? The article says there’s no scientific evidence to prevent trans athletes but only talks about testosterone. The complains I have heard center more around a person who had natural male hormones until say 16, and so had puberty male growth in bones and joints to support male muscle mass. Then, transitioned. The hormone levels would be the same as any other female athlete, but would prior bone and joint growth be “locked in”?
Does that give an advantage? Especially in a sport like swimming where arm length and shoulder size are so critical for the physics of propultion through water.
You can short-cut all the biology and just observe that bad trans athletes stay bad after transition, middling ones stay middling, and stellar ones stay stellar.
There may still be some minor advantages or disadvantages left but the ballpark looks fair, also don’t forget that there’s plenty of cis genetic freaks – have you seen Michael Phelps’ hands? Should he be disqualified because it’s unfair that he’s more fish than human? Should we change basketball rules so that short people aren’t at a disadvantage?
There might be but keep in mind longer arms needs more force to drive and trans women generally don’t have the testosterone to grow large muscles.
Also like all sport is unfair, it’s inherently the point. When a tall, muscular, woman wins a swimming contest nobody is waiting in the wings to measure her serium testosterone level and determine whether it was legitimate. We accept that people have physiological variations, different economic opportunities, and different mental capacities. We are interested in exploring what a person can do within rough approximately fair bands of competition.
Trans people generally want to transition early, so there’s not a huge amount of time for puberty growth or lack thereof (remember trans men dammit!) given proper support for most people. Even later transitioners don’t seem to have any significant advantage, given the lack of winning they’re doing. I suspect any advantage that may exist is massively, massively, dwarfed by being wealthy enough to hire competent coaches/take the time to train + good childhood for high likelihood of positive psychological coping with stress.
Trans people generally lose on both those fronts.
They are lying, or to be more exact, lying by omission. Of course there is bone density differences, on top of the obvious skeletal ones. The “hormones will change their muscles,” is a red herring. Muscle fiber density remains unchanged, drugs or no drugs, all they have to do is go to the gym and they will develop musculature that is different to actual women. This is why they seem to olpy focus on “muscle mass,” over muscle fiber density. No way they do not know the difference.
Not to mention that the argument that we should okay giving developing children/teens hormones is also a false argument. Since when are we okay risking chemically castrating children? Which will either affect them biologically and/or mentally during such important time of their lives. There is next to 0% objective research on the subject. Despite what proponents would like people to believe. For feelings does not equate empirical research.
So is centre of gravity, and other factors, that can play a role in sports. Men will always develop more upper body strenght over women. They are cherry picking arguments hoping that most people who do not know a lot of Human Anatomy will fall for it. In order to gain public opinion. It’s underhanded, or at least it looks like it.
Hell, even skin elasticity and skin patterns are different between men and women.
Seems to me there is near unanimity from relevant scientists & physicians that female trans athletes have no advantage over their female cis counterparts.
If the state of that knowledge changes, then by all means revisit the rules, but unless & until that happens, banning trans women & girls from competing is deeply unfair & arbitrary.
I could see that a trans girl or woman who has yet to commence HRT might have some physical advantages, but until we’re considering national level competition, I think it is reasonable to let this (utterly tiny) minority compete.
For high level stuff, it would be easy to have a requirement of being on HRT for a minimum period. That said, attaining one’s peak achievable performance whilst going through what amounts to a second round of puberty sounds… impossibly hard.
I think we really need to know why sports are segregated.
If it’s because males have physical advantages over females, then you really want to separate by some kind of size or strength criterion. Weight classes, like wrestling or boxing.
If its because we don’t want children titillated by seeing the opposite sex change clothes in the locker room, then you need to come up with some way to address people with same-sex attraction.
If it’s just because that’s the way sports were when you were a kid, then let the two transgender kids play with the 10,000 cisgender kids.
FINA already bars trans-women who went through male puberty from competing as women, and that seems like a pretty fair compromise. At least until you pile on states trying to ban medical care for transgender youth - i.e. puberty blockers - or other difficulties many trans-youth have in obtaining such care. My understanding is that HRT after puberty doesn’t come anywhere close to the biological effects of actual puberty, in terms of strength, size, and speed.
FINA already bars trans-women who went through male puberty from competing as women, and that seems like a pretty fair compromise.
I didn’t know I was trans until I was 18 because nobody explained it in a way that made sense to me. The literature was not made accessible. You need to put a ton of effort into educating kids before you can put in a rule like that fairly.
People who don’t realize they’re trans until adulthood aren’t really the target for people making rules for high school sports. Even college - if you’re a competitive men’s athlete, only to realize in your junior year that you’re trans - do you just give up on the men who’ve been your team mates and peers for years and try to form new relationships with the women’s team (if there even is a women’s team in your sport)?
We’re whittling down what was already a small minority of trans athletes to essentially unique hypothetical individuals. I don’t really think it’s possible to make rational rules to address every possible set of circumstances with such a poorly understood phenomenon. Best you can do is offer some guidelines, and minimizing distortions due to sexual dimorphism is a decent guideline. If there’s a male not beyond the size of competitive females, then that trans-woman seems fair to play with cis-women. If she’s the size of Jason Momoa because she’s been playing football as a man for 20 years, I doubt that a course of HRT will make her any less overpowering to competitive cis-women.
Maybe it’s just a sacrifice she will have to make, to postpone her medical transition and keep playing football, or begin her transition and accept that it will cost her the starting position on the men’s team without access to an equivalent women’s team. I mean, few of us can have everything we want, and most competitive athletes have to sacrifice some other aspects of their identity to be competitive.
this is uh…kind of a mess as far as science goes. Making claims about completely uncited studies, and being weirdly proud of the metric that would be something that needs adjusting in an actual study, that most female athletes are cisgender and also most winning female athletes are cisgender. This needs adjusting for population, you cant say white people are more likely to be obese in America because there’s more obese white people than other races.
There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2917954/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21058750/
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199607043350101as far as i can tell, the claim that most female athletes are cisgender is mostly a refutation of the political motivation, that trans women are dominating women’s sports, which is a common refrain in much of the legislation around this topic. the reality is that trans people aren’t winning any prominent competitive sports, in part because they are such a small minority of athletes.
i would honestly doubt this is something we could get a very conclusive study out of, if only because there isn’t a very huge sample size of competitive trans athletes that exist to be studied, and the ones that are there objectively haven’t been winning very many awards. nor do i think this needs to be adjusted by population. competitive sports are not a random sample, they are the self selected group of the most physically fit people for a specific task. the fact that trans women aren’t breaking records for competitive women sports, despite being in the self selected group of the women most fit for the task at hand, does say something on its own without the need for a more in depth statistical analysis.
There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels
i mean, maybe read your sources a little more? two of them are about the effects of dosing testosterone in “normal male” subjects, which is not generalizable to women, or to endogenic testosterone, or to the effects of HRT for either transfeminine or transmasculine people, and the middle one is an overview of testosterone’s role in exercise in both men and women which says this in the abstract:
Findings on the testosterone response in women are equivocal with both increases and no changes observed in response to a bout of heavy resistance exercise
which directly refutes your stated claim. equivocal is a synonym for ambiguous. the effects of testosterone on resistance exercise in women is explicitly recorded as inconsistent according to the article you’re citing.
Which is why trans girls need to have completely blocked testosterone, usually for a full 2 years, before any kind of competition.
They literally have less testosterone than the cis girls.
Separate male and female teams is the problem in the first place. It just reinforces the gender binary and makes life more difficult for trans, non binary and intersex people.
“But think of the children!” They will cry. “Boys might touch girls!”
They always seem to be thinking about children…
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i mean, no, that’s ahistorical. historically, the reason they are “split” is because men didn’t let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn’t want them to be the same thing. it wasn’t some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.
Let’s make a bet. We combine men and women’s sports. There will eventually be no women in sports, because, even though the top ranking women can beat some, or even most, men, they cannot beat the top men.
If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t see such a wide gap in points/speed/weights/whatever between top men and women in their respective sport.
There may still be trans people in said sport (though I doubt it, but maybe), but there will definitely be no women.
Let’s say this does happen. Then what do we do for women in sports, who are now, by default, completely excluded?
the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don’t collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don’t need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.
the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it’s great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.
i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn’t mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you’re playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn’t have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won’t be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.
the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don’t collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don’t need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.
Yes, weight classes in wrestling exsist, and we still have women’s division, because women and men in the same weight class would still have the outcome of men placing top outcomes in those weight classes.
The issue isn’t the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person’s life might turn out. To be winning these competitions means money, scholarships, endorsements, careers. To be at that level, kids today start getting pretty serious in middle school, and definitely serious in high school, due to the scholarship/school acceptance possibilities for universities, universities scout from high schools, and pro leagues scout from universities, and careers are made there. These are big deals and big opportunities, so to say “its just fun.” Is downplaying the serious of it. That’s not even getting into the severe dangers that can happen to women physically by going against a man in team sports. Even sports like soccer can be dangerous in that way, far more than what we deal acceptable.
the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it’s great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.
Disabilities in humans are still an outlier, which is why we have a whole seperate competitive field for them to play in. It wouldn’t be fair to match them with those without disabilities.
So why, if the trans population is exploding, don’t we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.
i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn’t mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you’re playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn’t have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won’t be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.
Anything humans do, if you break it down enought, can become arbitrary. That’s not a reason to push people out of sports, and again, sports at these levels arent for fun, for the players, its a lifelong persuit that tales a ton of effort and sacrifice. Billions of dollars, scholarships, careers.
There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn’t have to be like that?
The issue isn’t the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person’s life might turn out.
explicitly my argument is speaking about the way we construct sports as an activity, not sports as industry. the people for whom sports defines one’s life path are firmly the minority of people who do sports. and like, the laws we’re talking about aren’t affecting trans people’s ability to do professional sports in most cases, because those professional organizations aren’t under the jurisdiction of anti-trans state laws, they’re almost exclusively impacting children playing sports in school or for regional competitions. if you aren’t interested in engaging with the argument as it exists, and with the people who are primarily affected by laws that prevent trans children from doing sports with their peers, i’m not interested in talking further on the matter.
So why, if the trans population is exploding, don’t we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.
because the trans population is not “exploding”. that’s the current moral panic going around, but the visibility of trans people in media, especially right wing media, vastly overestimates how many trans people there are. there are more trans people who are out, but its still like less than 2% of the population. of that population that are athletes, even less, and there are close to no trans athletes competing at the high level you insist this conversation must primarily address. segregating trans people into their own divisions would mean trans people don’t get to play, because there aren’t enough people who are trans and doing sports to make that happen. your solution is to marginalize trans people out of the sports everybody else plays, and that sucks.
There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn’t have to be like that?
the only way you’ve proposed to “include” trans people in sports marginalizes them and prevents them participating with their peers, all in service of a a fear that changing the rules to be more inclusive would push out “biological women” in some hypothetical future you think is inevitable. but the reality is, there is no actual proof that allowing trans people to participate as they see fit would actually lead to the outcome you’re describing, because in many cases, they have been participating and have not been sweeping the competition.
in any case, nobody who advocates for restructuring sports away from the gender binary sees women being pushed out of sports as a desirable or even achievable outcome. the idea that we would change the rules towards a policy which does such a thing and not continue changing the rules until we arrive at a more equitable and inclusive outcome is a fantasy, almost entirely sustained by right wing reactionaries fear mongering about social change. nobody actually seriously considering the inequities of modern sports is blind to the physical differences between men and women’s bodies, and they, again, are not proposing a flattening of sporting events into a single category containing all people, just a diversity of categories representing the diversity of the human condition, and allowing people with similar bodies to compete against each other without strict delineations of gender. unless you genuinely believe that all male athletes can outperform all female athletes in all sports, which is a vast overestimation of human sexual dimorphism, there is room for co-ed competition that accommodates people according to their individual skill and strength, rather than according to whether or not they have the right genitals.
Exactly, switch over to leagues based on whatever benchmark makes sense for your sport and call it a day
My loose understanding is that a lot of men’s divisions are actually open, while it’s women’s divisions that are strictly confined to women. For some sports though, there’s such a strong sex gap that very few women are realistically competitive with men. Ensuring a division where competitively play is the entire purpose of having women’s divisions in the first place.
This obviously depends a lot of the individual sport though. Muscle mass and strength are a lot more pivotal in something like weightlifting or American football than in archery.
The types of benchmarking needed to measure an individual athletes potential to ensure they aren’t sandbagging would be too costly to implement at anything but the highest levels of athletics.
It is an incredibly complex solution to a non problem.
Let trans athletes compete with cis athletes.
There simply aren’t enough trans athletes for this to be a problem worth considering at a systemic level. At an individual level, if someone lacks the level of self awareness to enter an event where they consistently beat cis women(like if they were an accomplished cis athlete just a few months into transition), then there can be an individual ruling on that person.
Don’t fall for the conservative trap, their hyperbole is engineered (in part) to produce untenable “solutions” from progressives.
It is a problem systematically already, we’re seeing women be pushed from top ranks bit-by-bit. In Chicago, trans women won gold and silver for a biking event. This is going to continue to happen, especially if what trans people are saying is true and there are many more trans people who will be coming out and living how they want.
Trans athletes can compete with biologically-aligned people of the opposite sex in trans-only events, which should be a thing for each sport. This is by far the easiest, most rational decision that doesn’t stomp on biological women. Trans men take testosterone, and trans women take estrogen. Let them either compete in the men’s division or against each other.
What, exactly, is “untenable” about opening a division for them?
What are biological people? Are there non-biological people?
You’re right, I worded that strangely. Changed it to biologically-alligned for clarity.
