The thing is, there’s not much point debating you.

Hey, I’m genuinely sorry if anything I’ve said has come off as hurtful or insincere. I don’t like to think of this thread as a debate, myself. I like to have conversations, and I really don’t like debates full of gotchas and personal attacks that some “anti trans” people use. I wouldnt call myself anti trans. I try to just talk and listen, and let people know when I agree with them. If you aren’t super comfortable talking here, I don’t want to pressure you to continue. I try to see you as a conversation partner and not an opponent since we’re all humans after all. For now, you asked some questions and made some statements, so I’ll answer those:

But, I think you don’t want sports segregated by sex assigned at birth, either. If you did, you would have trans men competing against women.

You’re right actually, I don’t think segregating by sex is the best possible solution. I might have said something different before, so please excuse me if I misspoke. Thanks for catching me out there. I think that it is important that women have the right to their own protected category, to increase opportunities and recognition. I probably explained that better in my last response. But in general, I think it would be nice if there were two categories: Women and Open. As far as the Open category goes, anyone would be able to participate there no matter what, as long as they can perform at the level required. This gets rid of a lot of silly debates, while still allowing women athletes to have guaranteed access to opportunities and recognition in the Womens category, or choose to compete on the Open stage if they qualify. Since I can’t have my ideal world, though, I think that having Mens and Womens categories is… an ok solution. How much can we reasonably change? As far as your question of: “trans men competing against women” goes, most sporting authorities have rules that athletes can’t compete if they’ve taken a steroid (extra testosterone for example) in the last X months. Do you think this is a good rule?

feel free to look into long- and ultra-distance running for instances of women getting closer to men’s times

Ah! Yes, I’m actually familiar with this. Thanks for bringing it up. Long distance / endurance competitions are one of the few cases where women may outperform men. This is pretty interesting, and I haven’t looked into why it is. Maybe pain tolerance? Either way, this is pretty cool.

I’d really like to understand you point of view better. If you have some time, I’m curious. Can I ask:

• Are you confident that women and men will be on par with each other athletically in the future? If so: are you saying that A. the average man and average woman will be on par with each other, or B. the very best men and women will be par with each other?
• If you wouldn’t mind, could you give a numerical rating of 1-10 of how confident you are in this?

I’d also like to ask, based on your last comment:

The biggest issue is that there just aren’t enough trans athletes to know how much of an advantage or disadvantage being trans gives you, but, on average, it is likely to be pretty minimal if there even is one.

How would you define being trans? This might seem like a silly question, but I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Personally, I think that anyone who says “I’m trans” is trans. This means that no medicalization is necessary, cause trans is just an identity. So according to that definition, “being trans” alone gives you literally 0 advantage/disadvantage! (lol at the technicalities of definitions). But yeah, What do you think?