But height and weight isn't all. Even at the same height and similar weight women tend to have less muscle and a harder time to build it up. So if you only do height and weight, women would generally pushed out of many professional sports (not all of them, in some cases it is less relevant). Which in turn would demotivate girls when they know they will never be competitive.
What you're saying is kind of what I'm getting at.
It's not just a matter of muscle mass, either; it's bone density and skeletal structure, elasticity of connective tissue leading to flexibility, fat distribution, balance and kinesthetic sense, et cetera. It's the same reason women's gymnastics and skating get more attention than men's: women are more flexible with better balance due to lower centres of gravity and (statistically insignificant in other sports) greater kinesthetic perception, leading to those sports being more competitive and impressive to spectate for women than men.
Hence why I say both sides of the debate ought to put their money where their mouths are. If distinctions between biological sexes
don't impact performance as much as the "pro" camp asserts, there won't be gendered difference in outcome. If those distinctions are the
only ones that matter as the "anti" camp asserts, men should dominate nearly
every sport. This is why I call this ridiculous culture war bullshit: both sides know they're completely full of shit, lack the conviction in their own arguments to put their beliefs to the test, and are weaponizing trans athletes (to their detriment) to push partisan narrative.
The issue
isn't reconcilable, because those physical traits develop during adolescence as a consequence of androgens/estrogens and are largely non-mutable after through gender-affirming hormone therapy.
Some may correct, leading to a normalization in performance for
some sports after an arbitrary time on HRT, but in sports in which height and bodily structure influence performance that normalizing effect only goes so far.
But honestly, I do believe classifying sports by those markers would lead to a fairer landscape than we now have, without bringing gender politics into the equation. And, it would force a certain degree of evolution among those sports as athletes and coaches explore, discover, and learn to counter strategies for circumventing differences in biological sex.
The only reason intersex people in sports currently get attention is because some idiots want to conflate it with trans issues.
We don't even have to bring non-binary and trans athletes into the question to make that point. Remember when the French threw a shitfit over Lance Armstrong's "doping" which led to the man being publicly humiliated, and practically his entire career stripped from record...
then it turned out other than the HRT he had to have due to cancer, all that "doping" he did was actually universal, and the French were the world's leading authority and
by far the guiltiest?
We don't even have to discuss those who had testicular cancer, to make the point either. Remember when Michael Phelps was accused of this shit, particularly over the cryotherapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and oxygenated blood injections, near-exclusively by parties who engaged in not just the same practices, but to far higher degrees?
Right now, it's just that trans and intersex athletes are stuck in the middle of an international shit-slinging contest over whose "performance enhancement" methods are legit and whose aren't. I'll believe it's actually about trans and intersex athletes when the French bring a full team of 'em to the Olympics, and complain about
other countries' trans and intersex athletes.
