This is a quite interesting and sensible commentary on the issue from legal scholar Dorianne Coleman (Duke); I'll post a somewhat lengthy excerpt, but do read the whole thing (and you can also look at a longer scholarly article by Professor Coleman on this topic):
Last week, track and field’s world governing body limited entry into women’s events to athletes who have testosterone levels that are capable of being produced solely by ovaries.
These rules apply across the board to athletes however they presented at birth. Advocates for intersex and transgender athletes have vigorously attacked the International Association of Athletics Federations’ new rules, but they are an extraordinary compromise for women’s sports, including for traditional feminist proponents of equal access to sports for girls and women, guaranteed in the civil rights legislation known as Title IX.
Understanding the rules and why they make sense is hard. They are based in biology people don’t know or don’t like to talk about and, let’s be honest, at least in some circles, they’re politically incorrect. They force us to talk about women’s bodies when it is increasingly taboo to do so, and they run counter to the movement that seeks to include transgender and intersex people in social institutions based on their gender identity rather than their biology.
These are important progressive developments, but their effects on valuable institutions like women’s sport are real and they need to be understood before positions harden on bad information. Pretending that the female body doesn’t exist or that we can’t define the boundaries between men’s and women’s bodies is a bad idea for many reasons. Replacing traditional sex classifications with classifications based on gender identity certainly has steep costs in contexts like competitive sport, where the likelihood of success is precisely about sex-specific biology....
Specifically, the athletes who are the focus of the I.A.A.F.’s rules are those who have testes. Starting in puberty and as adults, their testes produce sperm, not eggs, and supply testosterone in quantities that biologically female bodies and their ovaries never come close to producing.
The male range at its lowest is three times higher than the female range at its highest. At puberty these athletes developed male, not female, secondary sex characteristics: increased muscle mass and strength, including increased heart size; higher hemoglobin levels, which result in better oxygen carrying capacity; and different muscle types and ratios of fat to muscle.
Advocates for intersex athletes like to say that sex doesn’t divide neatly. This may be true in gender studies departments, but at least for competitive sports purposes, they are simply wrong. Sex in this context is easy to define and the lines are cleanly drawn: You either have testes and testosterone in the male range or you don’t. As the I.A.A.F.’s rules provide, a simple testosterone test establishes this fact one way or the other.
Testosterone throughout the life cycle, including puberty, is the reason the best elite females are not competitive in competition against elite males. This 10- to 12-percent sex-based performance gap is well documented by sports and exercise scientists alike. But it isn’t the most important performance gap. Rather, that’s the mundane fact that many nonelite males routinely outperform the best elite females.
Prior to reading Professor Stock's essays, and others, including some of the "responses," I hadn't given much thought to this issue. My pre-reflective view was that transgender women should be accepted and treated as women (and the same for transgender men as men), but now that I have learned more about some of the issues, it seems clear that there may be some discreet limits to when that makes sense. What those limits are should be a topic of respectful debate, though participation in competitive sports is clearly one arena where lines need to be drawn. And it's not a "debate" when the only position that can be articulated without generating abuse is one that accepts the most ambitious (and, without fail, self-serving) claims of some members of the trans community. (For an example of the problem, see this account of the repeated attacks on Women's Place UK, including on university campuses.)
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