Competitive sport is unusual in that the whole thing is, in a sense, a search for outliers.

Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag.

In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.

In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.

Well, in your example, carpentry isn't about winning or being the best, it's about creating a house to sell (or flip, where you could actually frame a better argument about doing the worst possible job the fastest).

We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."

Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.

(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)