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Im deleting all this in a few hours bc i don't need to be dogpiled rn or to fight with people who have strong opinions on things outside their lanes, plus, as an evil assimilationist, i don't want to explicitly out myself on the internet.
So, about the cs thing. First, i'm coming at this as a former locally competitive female distance runner, as a fan of track and field, and as amab trans.
Fortunately i was never talented enough to place highly in any big race, but i have imagined what it would be like to be challenged due to trans status.
I've also imagined what i would think about competing in the same category as people with androgenic glands who respond biologically to testosterone.
And my position would be, if i were challenged due to trans status and asked to provide proof of lower than 3.0 nMol/l t, i wouldn't be thrilled, but i'd do it. And i'm sure it would be lower because i don't have balls.
If i were competing against a trans woman who's non-op and non-hrt, though, i would not consider myself as playing on the same field. For intersex athletes there's further complexities.
There's complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, and there's partial, which makes drawing a line more difficult.
But the ruling is that using t levels while also considering sensitivity is the way to draw the line. It's arbitrary, i accept that, but based on the current scientific picture, it's by far the best criterion.
There's people who say there should be no gendered competition at all, and that the difference in athletic performance in men and women is sociopsychological.
I find the idea that if only female athletes didn't internalize sexism, they'd be 10 % faster incredibly insulting, and i have nothing to say to those people.
So if you accept the position that cis women should not compete with cis men, the question becomes how to define the categories.
If it's not sociopsychological, what explains difference between male and female athletic performance? It's not chromosomes, otherwise women with cais would have advantage over women without cais.
So let's say the difference is due to differences in bone structure and/or difference in t levels. Note first that the difference between bone length ratios between cis men and women, like height, averages around different values, but those differences are relatively minor.
However, looking at distributions of t levels, there's a much starker difference. There's plenty of cis women taller than cis men. But cis women with high t levels will still have lower t levels than men with low t levels, with room to spare.
So it makes sense to hypothesize that t levels are the more important factor. And to test this hypothesis, you could consider amab female athletes who transition as adults.
The difference between elite male and female running times is around 10 %. If bone geometry has an effect on running performance on the same scale as hormones, you'd expect runners who competed pretransition to lose less than 10% performance post transition.
But this does not appear to be true. Admittedly the research is not extensive, but the best research available shows that adult trans women runners lose about ten percent.
Perhaps further research will show that on average the performance hit is, say, 5% and not 10%, and that on that basis i should not compete with cis women. I accept this. It would suck, but i'd accept it.
But the evidence we now have does not support this. But then, what if the difference were 8 or 9 %, ie, some advantage but only a slight one? Then i might argue that it's close enough.
But the way i think about things to myself is that if i were competing against a cis woman with roughly the same talent level, we would run around the same times if we trained equally hard.
And that if i trained harder, i would run faster, as well as vice versa. This has in fact been my experience. I was running 100km a week, plus workouts, when i was in pr shape.
Men doing this kind of mileage might have a sub 3 marathon pr, and it wouldn't be unusual. Women doing this kind of mileage might also have a sub 3 pr, but that would be unusual. My pr is 3:18.
Which is usual relative to most women of similar build doing that kind of mileage, maybe even a bit slow. This is clearly not scientific, but it's enough to justify to myself if not to other ppl that it's fair for me to compete with cis women.
On the other hand, i wouldn't consider it fair if a non-op non-hrt amab trans woman were to compete against me. I probably wouldn't make a protest, but in my head i would not be competing against her. The same with an intersex woman.
Anyway, none of this should be as big a deal compared with doping, and it's far far more likely that your imaginary daughter will lose to a doped cis woman than to a trans or intersex woman.
