news

If transphobia wasn't rampant, that would be ideal. But transphobia is rampant, and it just means each and every sport defaults to exclusion. That's how it worked before this IOC ruling. That's how it worked at the last Olympics, in which zero trans women were able to compete.

Idealised scenarios that assume fairness and good will don't work. They just lead to exclusion, and worse, they make it impossible to gather more data.

And the reason for that is that everyone thinks like you. Which is to say, everyone thinks "Biology matters", but for some reason, is never working to challenge that assumption by acknowledging that trans folks biology changes with the introduction of hormone replacement. It's also a space with a lot of bad faith and actively misleading research, because of the aforementioned transphobia.

Excluding trans people from sport is an openly acknowledged "first step" of a where they're using to normalise exclusion of trans folk in wider society. These are the folk generating much of this research, research that normally would be laughed out of the room, but when it's about trans people and aligns with the "common sense" belief that trans folks have an advantage in sports, somehow the research gets taken seriously.

That's the environment we live in. And that's the environment that tried your approach, as a stepping stone to the outright exclusion we have now.