[space_fountain]

I think not many people are arguing that we shouldn’t exclude people based on testosterone in elite events, but none of these were trans women, these were all women who lived their entire lives as women from the moment they were born

[lesostep]

I'd argue about testosterone. High testosterone happens in some woman naturally, why exclude them? They still are woman, they should have a right to participate.

Height is also an advantage in sports, and women statistically are much shorter then man, should we ban tall woman from sports? Should we say "she exhibits a male amount of height, it isn't fair to let her participate with 'normal' woman"?

The more "fair" we make woman competition the narrower our definition of a woman gets.

If you want to make it fair, let's pick a random chemical in man exclude people from competition based on their readings. That surely would make sport career look more fun for everyone, training all your life only to find out that some committee doesn't consider you a man. And then we can celebrate equality by noticing that man-to-woman sport participation ratio got closer to 50-50

[space_fountain]

My view is that testosterone is a reasonable thing to discriminate on because:

1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics

2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports

3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness

But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution

[nerdsniper]

It's dumb because there are two types of hyper/hypo-gonadism. "Primary" hypergonadism is where you have way more of the hormone in your blood stream. You're advocating testing for only "primary hypergonadism" in women.

Secondary hypergonadism is where someone has a normal concentration of the hormone in their blood, but they have an unusual abundance of hormone receptors.

The effects are the same, but currently we can only measure secondary hypergonadism during an autopsy/dissection.