I found this entire dynamic quite curious: for the same reason men and women sports are separate (and even age groups), I'd expect us to recognize the reality and introduce non-binary sport classes (like we've got in auto sports). Eg. "these hormonal levels put you here" (of course, someone more familiar with medical realities should come up with actual classification, and sure, classification is going to be broken until we iterate on it a bit).

It is a hard transition to make because of historical reasons, but it seems to be inevitable or we risk demotivating whole classes of sportspeople.

It's almost like there is a lot of money devoted to making people think that this is a much larger problem than it is.

People want you focused on a fake enemy, so you won't realize who is really trying to hurt you.

Transgender people are a very vulnerable group, with a much higher suicide rate than the general population, and, they especially out of all disadvantaged groups need to be treated very carefully, with the utmost respect and kindness.

Something I learned when one of the candidates for a university election I was voting in was found by the LGBTQ Society to have written an article along these lines, is that articles like this need to show more empathy towards the transgender athletes. They’re humans too. This author treats them as near-unnamed other of “These Athletes”. They’re a faceless, indentityless other. They also repeatedly refer to the other competing athletes as “girls”, and never the transgender athletes as so.

I’m not offended by this language, and I agree with tye assertion that it’s unfair for athletes born as women. However, you aren’t going to win over the people you need to win over with language like this. You need to be extremely kind and polite and lay out your case with regard to how tg women feel. It’s not enough to make your case as a matter of discrimination against women and expect the woke world to rally behind you.

I would imagine that a fair amount of tg women agree with the argument, if possibly not the presentation, in this article. The tg women competing in and winning these events are basically providing reactionaries with a stick to beat all tg people with. The problem is that articles like this, and when Joe Rogan opens his big mouth, despite good intentions, largely spread suspicion and fear of tg people

Can we not? This is Hacker News, not MumsNet.

Everyone who has ever quoted the "First they came..." poem needs to take a look at what is happening with transgender people at the moment, and apply what they were supposed to learn from that poem.