It is absolute absurdity how people seem convinced that gendered sports are about getting rid of “unfair advantages” to begin with. Left-handed people are overrepresented in baseball, tennis, cricket, and boxing. There’s a disproportionate number of people with autistic traits who play chess at a professional level. Are we going to make separate left-handed leagues for sports? Separate neurodiverse leagues? Faaaark oorfff. What makes sports interesting is that different people with different bodies are competing against each other. If we’re going to pissé pant over people’s differences then all sports might as well be played by teams of identical twins.

And what actually gives trans women an “unfair advantage” in sports, anyway? Are any of these traits, things like height or bone density or hormone levels, actually unique to trans women, or are they also found in some cis women? If there are any traits that are genuinely specific to trans women, what makes these traits different from left-handedness in tennis? If you’re needing to craft sports policy that somehow excludes all trans women but also includes all cis women with less common traits, then that is transphobia cap-a-pie. Moreover it’s misogyny cap-a-pie. It all relies on the same narrative not just that trans women are willing to uproot their lives and face immense discrimination just to win a medal, but that women are all weak and frail and need to be protected from some sort of outside menace or perversion. Somehow trans women are all so big and bulky and mannish that it’s absurd to let us play football or something, but also so feminine and graceful that we can’t be allowed into beauty contests. We’re too stupid but also too clever. None of these narratives are consistent. These narratives aren’t even new or unapplied to other groups previously.

So what is the point of women’s sports, then? Well, it’s about providing role models for girls, and it’s about giving women athletes, who have faced discrimination in funding and attention, and been cut off from a lot of sports science, the opportunity to build athletic skills, right? All of this applies to trans women as well. Trans women can be role models. Trans women face discrimination (obviously). Trans women’s bodies are underresearched and are not the same as cis men’s. There are no distinctions you can draw between trans women and cis women that matters. People shouldn’t fall hook line and sinker for this sort of pointless division of womanhood, just because they think trans women are kinda icky. That’s all this really comes down to.