Just wondering what your thoughts are on this topic..
I've been sort of going back and forth.
Firstly, I have nothing against trans people. I basically come from the 'live & let live' school of thought. As long as something is not hurting anyone, I'm generally ok with it.
However, the question about trans athletes has been circulating throughout the media, where the objection against trans athleses is essentially that, by allowing cis men who've transitioned into being trans women compete in sports, they gain an unfair biological advantage. Thus, they are ruining women's sports.
So I've considered this objection. Women's sports has been (biological) women's sports throughout generations. And indeed, I think it is taking away from that community if we suddenly allow people with significantly higher muscle and bone densities to compete in it. I think there is no question if we mixed biological men and women together in a large enough sports competition, the record holders would be all men, even if in the mid section of the distribution there would be a mix of men and women. If we put Mike Tyson in ring with whoever is the current female world champion of boxing, we'd get a blood bath. The reason why biological men are better at most sports, on average and especially at the tails of the distributions, is because when they hit puberty they had higher levels of testosterone, which allowed them to further develop their muscles compared to biological women.
However, having said that, I also sort of agree with the opposite arguments. Namely, I think what has been brought up several times is that we're not disqualifying anyone for their biological advantages in sports anyway. There are plenty of people who were simply born with better genes and a physical advantage. So why then say the physical advantage should disqualify trans women from sports? For example, say, today, we found out that black people on average were physically superior to white people that gave them an advantage in certain areas, like boxing. Should we then separate black and white people so that they can have their own categories? Probably not a great idea.
Nevertheless, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the argument.
I think it's not so much that the biological differences are bad or unfair. I think the actual objection is that the women's sports has come to mean one thing, has established its own community, and we want to change that community by force, which rips apart that community by allowing a new set of people with huge advantages. I think it would not be a problem, per se, if trans people were broadly part of women's sports, and even dominated it. However, I think the problem is that, right now, that is not what women's sports is, and changing it would, seemingly, change the state and meaning of women's sports. So I guess it's a question of which community gets hurt more, the trans community or women's sports.
But then again, if we had the same situation with white sports and black sports, where some people were arguing that white sports is white sports and allowing black people to participate would ruin the community, hmmm, I don't know. I'd probably think those people were racist as shit.
So I dunno. But then again, I don't even watch sports.