While reading the linked article, it seemed to me that there’s a lot of unclear conversation on the subject of intersex and transsexual women in sports.

Disclaimer: I’m a transsexual woman, I’m not intersex, and I know very few intersex people and am largely ignorant about intersex people’s experience. So I’m going to try not to generalise too much, but I hope that these thoughts are also relevant for intersex people. I’m 100% open to criticism from intersex people to change anything I’ve said on the subject.

So, as I understand it, the real purpose of women’s sports is actually so that it’s possible for women to take part in sport without being dominated by men.

Men dominate in several ways, of which physiology is only one. Discouragement of women and girls from considering their bodies as powerful is another, prejudice against women athletes another, lesser opportunities for women another, more social ties another (e.g. being expected to be the person to raise children), and that’s just a random handful.

The question to answer isn’t, “are intersex and transsexual people taking part in women’s sports actually women?”, because even trying to ask, “are intersex people women” may, for some, be the wrong question.

The right questions are, “will the participation of intersex and transsexual people in women’s sports result in those people dominating those sports”, “if so, is that a problem?” and “if so, are there any better solutions?”

For me, the answers are:

No, it won’t result in any significant changes in who is the ‘top’ at those sports. Apart from physiology (and not even always including this), we can expect intersex & transsexual people to face just as many, if not more, barriers to participating in sport at a high level.

Even if it did, that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. Society considers cis bodies superior to transsexual and intersex bodies in every way. I wouldn’t mind seeing transsexual and intersex people having the 'best’ bodies in one particular set of arenas.

Even if that was an insurmountable problem for most sponsors/audiences (which would be a shame, in my eyes), it seems there must be better solutions than this. Maybe the Paralympics are a place to look to for inspiration? I’m not an Olympic/Paralympic expert, so I can’t really say.

And no discussion of the Olympics should be complete without a reminder that they often take place on stolen land, that the sex industry surrounding them harms thousands of women, that they displace people from the area where they take place, that they are a drain on resources which could go towards marginalised people, that they are a festival of capitalism with all the evils that brings and that they are deeply interwoven with problematic nationalism.