Posted: Feb 26, 2019 3:46 am
Thommo wrote:I'm With Stupid wrote:The obvious problem with that is that there are so few MTF trans athletes that to find enough people to get a proper competition going is basically impossible. It's bad enough with individual sports. Imagine trying to get a football team together. It's like in the Paralympics where you get people with different disabilities and they have to make a judgement about how disabled people are while at the same time not splitting them up so much that you can't get eight people for a race.
Perhaps the rules for elite sport don't need to be identical to those at lower levels?
I couldn't honestly say off the top of my head whether the percentage of the population with some kind of physical restriction that would qualify them for the paralympics would be vastly different to the percentage of the population who might be intersex identifying as female or male to female trans. It seems possible they are at least comparable.
But what you're basically saying there is that trans athletes are never going to be allowed to compete at the elite level, only against other trans athletes.
Just to put it in perspective, trans athletes have been eligible to compete at the Olympics since 2003, and in that time, precisely zero trans athletes have qualified. We're not living in a world (yet, at least) where trans athletes are dominating women's sport. Even 'world champion' cyclist Rachel McKinnon is only world champion for the 35-45 age group, not world champion overall, and even she's lost far more than she's won. Any professional track cyclist would absolutely destroy her. A lot is based on hypotheticals at the moment, and yet the concerns of those on both sides are understandable. Especially when you go into combat sports, where getting this wrong could actually be dangerous. To be fair, most sporting authorities do seem to recognise that it's a complex area and so have complex rules to deal with it. But I'm not sure how much science actually goes into creating these rules.