Useful Limits For Reasonable Debate on Trans Athletes
The trans athletes debate is polarised in the extreme. These two cases should find consensus in delimiting the bounds of reasonableness.
You are the President of The International Olympic Committee, and at the next annual session of the IOC, you will have to put forward a policy on the participation of transgender athletes in their self-identified gender categories to the committee to be voted on. What will your policy be? (For simplicity, let’s disregard the need for a policy on non-binary athletes, since non-binary identity can take many forms and non-binary people can have many, often fluctuating, different preferences for what categories they would prefer to be included in.)
Broadly speaking, you have a few options. One is to take a hard-line, simple stance, banning transgender women from competing in women’s sporting categories, and banning transgender men from competing in men’s sporting categories.
Or, you could propose the opposite extreme, allowing all transgender women and men to compete in women’s and men’s sporting categories respectively, in line with the self-identification of their gender, no medical checks or hormone examination necessary.
