Exactly. It's impossible to have both inclusion and fair play. We have to pick one, and as a parent of daughters who compete at fairly high levels it's more important to preserve the integrity of women's sports.

Many people like to focus on the purely physical attributes, but there's a clear distinction even in realms like chess.

The highest ranked female chess player is right around #55 globally, wherein the top 50 all are dominated by men.

Some of this may have to do with men having more interest/higher propensity of starting young which is where most grandmasters begin their journey, but still an interesting thing to consider nonetheless.

What would do about someone like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan

I know of one person who was born physically a woman, but has XY chromosomes. It is only due to modern medicine that we know that there is anything "unusual" with her gender. Otherwise, she is physically a woman with no observable clues to her condition.

(IE, in the past, she would have been infertile, and probably died young due to her situation.)

I'm not comfortable with saying that people like her need to compete with men.

If you segregate by sex alone then trans men get a big advantage.

I thought exactly the same thing until I had a politically agnostic fencing judge sit down and explain over the course of an hour and a half all of the steps national and international regulating organizations for that sport had taken to avoid issues with unfair competition. Whether similar field-leveling safeguards could be baked into the rules for other sports is left as an exercise, but this particular instance suggests there's more nuance here than your comment suggests.

You're assuming that people arguing for bans on trans athletes are making good faith arguments about competition in sports. You shouldn't.

Here in the US a significant part of antipathy towards trans people is the deeply held belief that being trans in public is a kind of sex abuse to the public. If you listen to what much of the debate has turned into here, it has little to do with competition, and far more with the obsession over what genitals people have in locker rooms and bathrooms.

At the end of the day the number of trans athletes is so vanishingly small it's not worth caring about the impacts on competition, when the debate itself is another framing of the conservative desire to make being trans illegal.

Depends on the time of the transition. So those who transitioned before puberty are disadvantaged

Walk me through how you think this is going to be enforced? Athletes will need to start dropping their pants? Disgusting invasion of privacy.

Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.

This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.