You’d divide up the sport into divisions which all exhibit people at the peak of physical performance and athleticism for what their meat sack allows.

This really doesn’t seem reasonable. Many sports favour size but that’s not the end all be all. Again, back to hockey, Quinn Hughes is arguably the second best defenceman on the planet and weighs 180, by NHL standards, he’s tiny. That’s the beauty of something like the NHL, we get to see the very best in the world against the very best. Watching Hughes against smaller players would be, at best, dull. But if you allow movement between those divisions, very soon you get back to the NHL and no women’s leagues. (Or leagues that are so far below the regular leagues that they become even less watched.)

Yes, people watch the paralympics etc but vastly fewer. Boxing is an interesting example but outside of spectacle fights, it’s pretty unwatched. It also has to be structured significantly differently as most competitors are not expected to have many fights over their careers. (Pacquio, one of the best boxers of all time, had 73 bouts.)

Consider, even in Canada, where we goddamn love our hockey (every province made a temporary change to our liquor laws so we could watch the Gold medal game in bars), it is all but impossible to watch any of the leagues below the NHL on regular TV/sports packages, even though those are our NHL team’s prospects and arguably, the second best hockey league in the world. (KHL is fine but…)

At the end of the day, this has that ring of “I would like to see this, consequences be damned” that the Left is a little famous for. And at the end of the day, these changes would be so an almost insignificant proportion (the number of people who become a pro athlete) of an already small percentage (number of transgender women - I mean, maybe in gymnastics there’d be an issue but for almost every mainstream sport, the concern is pretty unidirectional) can play in a hardly watched league and everyone else just has to suck it up.

It’s a thing about which reasonable people can disagree but I think that the sheer amount of gymnastics you have to do to even envisage a world in which this works (okay, we create new metrics for every sport, break every league and create new ones, everyone gets on board with watching dozens of new leagues and pretending there isn’t a best league and also women’s sports kind of gets relegated) is kind of proof that this isn’t an issue that makes someone a transphobe.

Frankly, and why this bugs me, is that I think that when we fight on the thin edge of things like this, even though the cause is noble, it really does make the Left look a little silly. (According to Gallup, about 3/4 of Americans are opposed to transgender women in women’s sports.) If we can’t be trusted to figure out when we need to compromise with the public/reality, why on Earth would anyone trust our fantastical claims about how we can lead them to a glorious socialist utopia despite all historical evidence to the contrary?