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Nothing stirs up more controversy in athletics than transgender athletes. There isn't a status quo that most athletes agree with on this matter. Many athletes feel highly opposed to competing against transgender folk, while many athletes support it, or just downright don't care. Joe Rogan puts it somewhat along the lines of - We divide athletics by gender because cisgender men have a biological advantage, which translates over to trans women having an advantage over cis women. Where cisgender women are the real victims here.
Then you have transgender athletes and their supporters who put it as - trans people shouldn't have to prove their biological sex and be allowed to compete so long as their hormones are similar to those they're competing against.
The rebuttal from the opposing side is along the lines of disregarding the developmental advantage that biological men have over women in muscle mass, fiber density, things of that nature.
There is a popular trans female MMA fighter who is often used as a metric when either side wants to argue. The anti trans athlete side will cite their fight where they fractured their cisgender female opponents skull. The pro trans athlete side will cite their fight where a cisgender female knocked out said transgender female fighter.
Then you have fighters in-between who just want to see people fight and don't really care about the advantages. Which I think is the inevitable path this will take. If you look at both men and women, every generation - men produce less testosterone while women produce less estrogen. Our sexual differences are lessening with each generation and we're growing closer to resembling each other.
There very well may come a time when the biological advantages men have over women in terms of athleticism, don't really exist anymore. A time where we don't divide athletes by biological sex. It will likely be a long ways away. This is kind of an outfield suggestion but I think we should strive to have more leniency on both sides by kind of meeting in the middle, hear me out.
What if we have transgender divisions? Not to further segregate people but to bring us together. Imagine if transgender folks growing up can have role models and watch them competing on TV. They get to go to school the next day and talk about it without hearing "Yeah well they only won because they're trans." and hear "Yo that knockout was wild!"
We have transgender women setting world records in sports like weightlifting and track. Then backlash from the public causes those records to be taken away. There's a lot of animosity around transgender athletes right now. I think a good stance to have is for us to realize that we won't be chasing herds of mammoth to survive anytime soon, where some of us are biologically niched to chase mammoth and protect while the other half is niched to give birth and nurture. We as a species are growing less athletic and becoming more dependent on technology. Eventually there will be less biological differences between cisgender and transgender people. Transgenders will be able to have surgeries with real living flesh specifically grown for them, the post op suicide rate will go down. We will socially agree on a proper age and level of subject matter to address what transgender is. It will become normalized and people will eventually treat it like being left handed.
I don't claim to have all the answers but I think a trans athletic division for MMA, Boxing, even the Olympics would help normalize trans people and even allow those growing up who are trans to openly have role models they can talk about without hearing backlash over it. I think it's a step in the right direction that could eventually lead to fights not divided by sex but just hormones. Some men have very little testosterone, some women have it very high. Maybe one day we can have divisions just based off weight and hormones. Then everybody can shutup, stop arguing, and just enjoy the sport.
What do you think?