[user104658]

Originally Posted by Livia

The claims that transwomen don't have an advantage in women's sports is disingenuous as best. If they've been through male puberty, they will be stronger and faster. Unless we're saying that men have no advantage over women in sport. We're not saying that, are we? Because that would be a claim too far.

The argument (although it's never framed negatively in this way) is essentially that the side-effects of the hormonal therapy counteract the advantages of male puberty, which in many cases is probably true (I have no idea how that can be framed as a good thing for an individual, but that's another issue, and their choice I guess)...

...but the issue of course is that even if that's true a lot of the time, it's not going to be true all of the time, which means that some trans people will have a clear advantage. That's all that matters really and there's an over focus on the "most of the time" when "most" has no relevance to top-level competition... like the whole point is that it's highlighting peak performance examples, not "the average".

BBXX's argument I think seems to be that we could test and exclude those who do have a competitive advantage on an individual basis but then it all starts to unravel and become really meaningless . "Trans people can compete with women - but only if we think they're not going to win".

Again in skill-based events it's not an issue but in individual events or team sports that have any physical component, it's just entirely impossible to disprove a biological advantage.