To pick an issue I think is extremely important, that fraction of a percent of transwomen who went through male puberty and are subsequently allowed to compete in women’s sports will re-write the women’s record books, relegate women to also rans and ruin many women’s professional careers. They should not be accommodated for reasons of fairness.
As for other contentious areas like change rooms, prisons and so on, only one transwoman with bad intent can cause harm to many women.
As others have pointed out, they can be accommodated in sporting events, prisons and so on in competitions and facilities designed for their biological sex.
I don't know. Yes and no?
While at one level I agree; but at another level there's this as well, lionking: How is it fair for a super-short five-foot-three almost-dwarf to box or wrestle or MMA it out against a six-foot-seven massively build almost-giant? It doesn't, right? Which is why we have different categories in some sports?
Well then, what this argument actually does is show up the far more nuanced nature of this question. Sure, to divide the sporting world into men and women makes for fairness, or a kind, but only by simplifying the question. I guess a five-foot-three man and five-foot-three woman boxing with each other is probably not all that unfair, and certainly far MORE fair than a five-foot-three man boxing with a six-foot-seven man.
If it is unfair for a woman to compete with a man, then a more nuanced view might be to see what are the factors that apply to some particular sport, and to see what kinds of categories make sense in that sport. Perhaps what might really make for real fairness is to go for handicaps?
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I don't know. Not really arguing for either side, really. I recognize that it is unfair for transwomen to go competing in women's categories, for obvious reasons. But perhaps what this question actually does is open us up to the far more nuanced nature of this question, of what is fair when it comes to sports. I mean, either have a free-for-all, where everyone competes with everyone else; or else have a closely structured set of categories, like in boxing for instance. (On the other hand, until such a system has actually been designed and put in place, I don't know, maybe simply going with two categories, as a simplistic and inadequate but nevertheless an attempt, of a kind, at fairness, that kind of works, as well.)
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eta: Deja vu! Heh, it comes back to me, now. Long long back, certainly before the pandemic, maybe well before that, I don't remember exactly when, I remember having this exact same discussion with another poster, in this very thread (earlier volume, obviously). I even remember the poster now, but I won't name them, I don't mean this as a callout (not that there's anything
to call out, it's just that that poster doesn't post here any more). So yeah, I just remembered, that poster had made this exact same argument, back when this thread was young(er), and I'd made this exact same ...not counter-argument exactly, but made this point about the far more nuanced nature of this question, about fairness in sports, than merely a men-women divide might rightly accommodate --- but that, in the meantime, we sort of kind of make do with (so that, to be fair, it seems a bit unfair to jettison it without first bringing in that more nuanced solution to this nuanced question). As far as I remember the question had gone unresolved that time. That poster was given to posting very prolifically, and apparently indefatigably; and I simply gave up and dropped off, after exchanging a few posts with them.
So yeah, deja vu! That's all this edit is for, to record that weird memory, of having had this exact same conversation already, and that I only just remembered.
