This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.

Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.

How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)

Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.

The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. That the issue of discrimination comes up is to be expected.

The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people.

The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.

> and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.

This is a gross (literally) misunderstanding of the entire topic

The ruling covers a lot of the nuanced cases, including rare DSDs that may never even apply to Olympic athletes

The tests DO NOT check for genitals, and that is irrelevant to the decisions! It's a cheek swab that checks genetics.

Seems to me like the obvious answer is to categorize these events by weight division rather than gender, but this will never be considered because the hysteria is the point.

The solution is to develop relative skill rating systems like Elo.

It seems like we are creatively bankrupt if we can’t think of any solution. I think many of us could think of a good solution in literally seconds.

And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.

Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?

Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.

If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.

But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:

Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.

Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.

One solution is to have more categories. Then people can compete in their relevant categories.

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>This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.

similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works.

The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages.

Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have.