The issue and complexity has never been whether men have an advantage over women. Everyone knows that. If you're attempting to summarise the debate on that basis you're clubbing an imaginary seal.
The issue is: * How do we define sex in terms of athletics, and is doing so discriminatory * If it is discriminatory, is it still necessary, and do we have enough evidence* to support making a discriminatory rule? * Should women remain a protected class in sport? After all, we don't have a short person basketball league, and we don't consider the natural advantage of tall athletes to be discriminatory. So on what basis do we say being tall is fair, but having too much testosterone is unfair? Is it qualitative and/or quantitative * If you use testosterone as a proxy for how "female" someone is in athletics, where do you drop the pin? How much testosterone should someone have and for how long? Is it a good enough proxy to justify this? * Does someone who transition correct their advantages from androngenisation enough to merit fair competition? * What is considered fair competition in sport? Where do you draw the line between advantages that are fair and advantages that are not? * Is demanding otherwise healthy trans (and DSDs) athletes to go on a hormone course in order to compete a medical ethics issue * how do you define Intersex (DSD) athletes, who are neither transgender nor fit into any neat category, and who are sometimes unable to process testosterone at all even if they have a lot of it? These are not people who transition, they are people born this way who fit into no neat male/female divide, and yet are overrepresented in sport * Ultimately everyone wants to be inclusive in sport (it's just sport ffs), but where do you include people who don't fit into neat categories? * Do sporting bodies have to be inclusive? As above, it's just sport. This may not be a human right's issue, even if it's an ethical one. * As you pointed out, there are no FTms dominating sport. So how do you make a scientific consensus on an issue where there is virtually no evidence? The rational may be somewhat sound in principal, but if you're talking about "this is obvious, no one can even debate it", and you're making that argument on an ethics and legal level, you need to do better than "men are stronger than women because testosterone".
Ultimately if you want to commit to discriminating against trans athletes (because even by the IAAFs ruling, this is fundamentally discriminatory, of course it is), you need to have really, really good evidence. And we simply don't.
Hence, complex.
People aren't digging into it on that level, because what you're talking about is a deconstruction of everything a sport is.
We have one very major divider in sports which is biological sex and that is being challenged. The biggest reason for this is that very few women can compete with men on any meaningful level athletically. It just is that big of a gap. Women are way smaller than men on average. It takes a pretty large statistical anomaly of a woman's athletic prowess to even compete with men.
Reality is that treatment options available for transitional purposes can't completely change someone's physical characteristics 100% to match that of a cis individual. This difference is apparent in athletics where the advantages of being born biologically male are still partially retained after going through a transition.
I'm not saying I have a solution. I'm not sure what can be done to make everyone happy. It just seems really disingenuous to get overly philosophical to dodge the main point of this entire debate. It is fair to propose any number of solutions. You just need to take the fact into account that allowing MtFs in athletics with cis females will result in a disproportionate level of representation of MtFs in the very top ranks of the female gendered (seems more appropriate in this case to use gender instead of sex) divisions to the detriment of many cis females.
I think a lot of people are very severely misunderstanding how much of an advantage being born biologically male is over being born biologically female. I don't know how that can be made any more clear. It is difficult not to assume that people struggling to understand this are just very inexperienced in spending time around male and female athletics. The difference is pretty huge.
Can't really have this discussion when people are so unaware to this reality. Like I'm trying to point out the obvious that people who are bigger, stronger, and faster can do much better athletically than those who display less size, strength, and speed.
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just tell them all your base doesn't belong to us because we were getting stoned...they'll understand-Ken156