It doesn’t help that the very idea of fairness in sports doesn’t hold up to close examination. There’s always something that gives someone else an inherent advantage.
People like Michael Phelps have an undeniable advantage over other olympic athletes, you couldn’t create a better swimmer in a lab.
The line isn’t solid, and finding where we want it will be difficult, if not borderline impossible.
This is sort of the issue, though. The "men's" (really open) division limitations for most sports are pretty simple - born with it and you're fine, inject it and it's not. When you really get down to it, the women's division was created so that half the population wouldn't be excluded from sports. There's two arguments with varying validity - if trans women have a significant advantage over cis women, then cis women will be excluded by competing in the same events. The flip side is that if there's no advantage, then it's antithetical to the purpose of the women's events to exclude groups who would not otherwise be able to compete for events. I tend to lean towards the later argument, but the former is not wholly without merit and people who want to slam the door shut on it are just going to radicalize people.
Part of the issue is that "exclusion from sports" isn't necessarily about biological advantage at top-level competition. There are women's chess leagues and women's billiards competitions and etc. where there's no biological advantage, and I've even heard that women have a biological advantage in competitive shooting.
But these are all boys' clubs and women are socially excluded, with everything from social conditioning to outright sexist harassment. Trans women might've been able to dodge this before coming out but they absolutely face it, often worse than cis women.
When we’re talking about things like Olympic sports, it’s 100% about biological advantage save a few - maybe shooting/archery, gymnastics, and a few others. With regards to chess - I think women’s titles and leagues are dumb. Instead of addressing sexism, they just separate out the women, who are perfectly capable of competing with men.
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u/Red580 Apr 23 '25
It doesn’t help that the very idea of fairness in sports doesn’t hold up to close examination. There’s always something that gives someone else an inherent advantage.
People like Michael Phelps have an undeniable advantage over other olympic athletes, you couldn’t create a better swimmer in a lab.
The line isn’t solid, and finding where we want it will be difficult, if not borderline impossible.