So would I be correct to think that your preferred "solution" is to ban trans women and trans girls from all competitive sport at every level (from primary school sports days upwards)?
Well, of course it's not a question of "banning" transwomen or girls from competitive sport, but one of deciding which category they should participate in.
My view is that where sport is segregated by sex, that should refer to biological sex rather than gender. It seems to me one of the clearest-cut issues in this whole debate: sport is segregated by sex due to physical, biological differences between males and females - more specifically, due to physical
advantages males have over females. How could it ever make sense to allow someone who is biologically male to compete in the opposite sex category simply because they identify as someone of the opposite sex, despite remaining biologically male?
In terms of whether it should start at “primary school sports days”, or at what point segregation should start, that's a difficult question. There's a strong argument that male sporting advantage only fully emerges at puberty, and so segregating sports by sex is less important at primary school level. Of course that's an argument for no segregation at all, not for allowing transgirls of primary school age to compete with girls. I'm also very uncomfortable with the whole idea of labelling kids of primary school age "trans". So at primary school level it's complicated, and honestly I'm not sure - perhaps sport should be more mixed at that level than it in fact is (as a young kid I know I was always much more interested in playing cricket and rugby than netball and rounders, so I dare say at that age I'd have welcomed that!).
However from high school level onwards, when puberty starts to kick in, then yes, I do think that where sport is segregated by sex, it should be by biological sex.
In general, I think the most elegant solution would be to have a women's category and an open category in most sports (except where safety is an issue - a caveat which itself acknowledges male physical advantage). Transwomen and any biological women who wished to do so could compete in the open category alongside men, while the women's category would be reserved for natal females. It's a solution which is already being explored in some sports: even my local sports centre has an open squash league and a women's squash league, and some of the women do indeed choose to play in the open league.
It won't. Thankfully.
(Except, of course, where there are obvious matters related to physical injury in contact sports, eg contact forms of rugby)
Perhaps not. As I said in my earlier post, what struck me as especially significant in the World Athletics announcement was the reversal of the principle that transwomen should be able to compete in the female category until it's proven they have an advantage, to one in which they're not allowed to compete until it's shown they
don't have an advantage. In other words, they're presumed by default to have an advantage.
But we shall see.
