Reading this article about men who believe they are, or should be, women playing in women’s sports, I had an insight I hope is worth sharing. We’ve had several examples of this happening and the trans athletes pretty much always win.
From those examples we learned that it is physiology, not mentation that gives trans the edge in women’s sports. Even assuming trans have a female “mind set,” if they do, it isn’t enough to level the playing field. It is the male body they were born with and perhaps, from their viewpoint, are stuck with, that gives them a winning edge.
Presuming we don’t want to convert women’s sports into a competition between XY trans athletes, excluding those actually born XX female, we need to limit participation to those whose female orientation is genetic, not mind over matter. The reasoning is like weight classes in boxing, leveling the playing field.
However much we want men and women to be equal, there is no getting past the fact evolution designed us to differ in some respects. Those specializations had survival value and as their descendants, we inherited those differences.
Most of those survival-oriented specializations happened when we were still hunter-gatherers, and it would seem males did most of the hunting, while females tended the young and gathered. In modern life those specializations are less useful, but some are repurposed in sports and in warfare. You can perhaps think of other examples.
