Once in a while, a transgender athlete competing in a women's sports league will win a major meet or event and everyone gets excited because they get to bust out their new favorite argument; that trans athletes should not be allowed to compete in women's sports and that all athletes must compete in the sports league aligned with the sex they were born.
The premise is that being born and developed as a male delivers an unfair physical advantage over cis women athletes and therefore it is unfair for the latter to compete with the former. This is one of those arguments people love to make because all of the facts seem to be overwhelmingly on their side, almost to the point where they believe it's rendered common sense. I have seen the stats and figures for this argument dozens of times; men are on average across multiple athletic events 9 - 12 % better than women for example or the more favored stat citing how male high school track times beat women's times at the national level.
Logic dictates then that this argument - trans athletes should not be allowed to compete in women's sports and must compete in the league aligned with their sex at birth - has a sound premise backed up by statistical facts. This is a good example of how the statistical possibility of something might render a premise true, but statistical probability means the practical application and ramifications of such an argument isn't useful.
If you listened to Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson tell it, the argument is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which we face an epidemic (or will very soon) of trans athletes dominating women's sports leagues, which will of course open the door to the eradication of women's leagues altogether. Even if this is charged as hyperbolic, they believe that even one trans woman beating a cis woman in a sport is deeply unfair. Despite the technical truth of the fact that there is a biological athletic advantage in men over women, both of these resulting ramifications are open to debate.
There is simply not an epidemic of trans women athletes completely dominating women athletes. There are a negligent number of trans athlete champions despite being allowed to compete as trans women for years. There are zero (0) trans women athletes who have never been beaten by a cis woman in their chosen sport/event. Being transgender is actually fairly rare, being a transgender athlete is even rarer than that, and being a transgendered athlete that can compete even at just the collegiate level is rarest of all. One of the trans athlete bans in Utah was vetoed by a Republican governor because there were something like 75 trans athletes out of 100,000 total athletes. While it's possible that a trans athlete could exist in the upper crust of male athletic ability, it isn't likely, and it's far-fetched to suggest this could put the existence of women's sports leagues in any existential danger.
Yet most proponents of this argument will set aside the likelihood of these problems and declare any instance of a cis woman losing to a trans woman as unfair. The ramifications of such an argument are bizarre. There are lots of cis women who possess a biological advantage from birth, some have increased testosterone levels, others might have greater height or wingspan, broader shoulders or more powerful muscles. A large facet of sports is just losing to people with a biological advantage over you.
We do not always create different leagues for categorical advantages. We do sometimes, like weight class in combat sports or the para-Olympics for example, but other times we don't; there are no separate running leagues only for Kenyans or professional basketball leagues for short people and tall people. Which is all to say the categories are decided upon for reasons beyond the biological or genetic advantage of competitors; clearly feasibility, team sports dynamics, the range of participant athletic abilities, safety, and even the likelihood of complete categorical dominance play a role.
This makes our understanding and ultimate decision on sports categories more complicated than those who espouse this argument would like everyone to believe, and it means their argument is far from air-tight. There are certainly good-faith debates to be had especially as it pertains to safety, but the discourse should be a reasoned debate and not an argument in which one side assumes it has complete objective dominance. It also means this should be a decision that sports leagues and the communities they work with make themselves, free of government overreach and legislation that prevents them from coming to a well-reasoned, fair decision.
