Alice Dreger writes,
Sport has been used as one way to push this liberalizing agenda — with Title IX and major league racial integration standing as two good examples of the push. The Identifiers are now trying to do the same thing in the debate on sex testing, and in doing so, are making what might be the most extreme version of the anti-anatomy argument: we should not bother thinking about sex anatomy at all, and just let anyone who says she's a woman play as a woman.
But maybe here we've finally hit the limit of using sport for this kind of social agenda. I mean, sure, we could do it — we could force sport to keep being the Joan of Arc of liberal democracy, and so we could decide common biological sex differences don't matter to gender divisions in sports. But if we do this, in the process we may be neutering sport itself.
Because at the end of the day, no matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one's social and political rights, surely we can't pretend biology doesn't matter in sports. Surely there's a reason we don't let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.
We've talked about the grey area of gender and sports on Apt. 11D. I'm with Alice.

Are there really that many trans people in sports that this is an issue? By the time most people transition, they’re past their prime athletic years so I have a hard time believing that they’ll “steal” all the elite spots. I feel like we’re making rules to forbid something that almost never happens.
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We can include pistorius (south African runner without legs, runs with specially designed prosthetics) and disabled athletes in thinking about this issue, too.. I disagree with the proposal that athletic eligibility can be determined by self identification, at least to the extent that we set eligibility) . I don’t know if dreger is characterizing the argument correctly, because I do think that when you include all human variability, gender is more of a grey area than those of us who fall on the typical spectrum experience.
It seems crazy to imagine that someone would have body parts amputated in order to win races, but it’s not out of the realm of human behavior, either. Gender changes are being permitted at earlier ages now, too. It’s not hard to imagine that elite levels of International competeion would be altered by allowing tran gendered individuals to compete as women.
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