There is an unacknowledged problem arising from the reality of gender transitioned people as a technological product. Which for sport especially is a problem. They aren’t another sort of human, another gender or race or phenotype. They’re something we made and maintain with medical technology, that we only recently invented and is being used to seriously and deliberately alter their innate physical characteristics.

   If you’re going to allow technological products into sports then you’ve opened the doors to a seismic shift in the conditions of competition. Doping is only the first issue that it becomes almost impossible to maintain a consistent position about. 

    This, of course, applies to any transgender person who has had any kind of modification to align their body with their desired sexual identification. Entirely different questions are raised by transgender athletes with no technological modifications. Men with unmodified male bodies who identify as females, and the reverse. At the very point that you decide to let them compete unmodified, without technological alternation, you raise the fundamental question of what it means to have men’s and women’s sporting categories, and why we even have them.

    If they don’t reflect essential, identifiable, competitively meaningful physical differences and characteristics, for what reason are we excluding anyone from competing freely in whatever sport they want? And why do we even have gender segregated sports? What exactly are we separating, and why? 

   There aren’t any coherent answers to these questions. Or at least, no answers that don’t make a mess of everything that already exists. What kind of basis are we left with for discriminating between male and female, other than self-identification? And if that’s the only valid criteria, why on earth should we have segregated sports based on differences of mere identification? Isn’t that like having seperate Olympic events for declared Democrats and Republicans? 

   This, then, is the dilemma. Either there are innate physical differences, and it’s necessary to conform to them as a transgender who wants to compete, or physical differences are insignificant and its only identification that matters. But the second option, as I’ve said, calls into question the whole basis for sex segregated sports, and the first makes a mess of the Olympic prohibition against using overt technological means to achieve the physical requirements to compete.

    Why have a prohibition against doping, hormones, and other forms of technological modification of the body, if conformity to gender norms by means of technological modification is justified and allowed? And where do you draw the line, either among who should be allowed modification or over how much modification it’s OK to do?

    Why shouldn’t everyone have access to similar modifications, on the argument that they are disadvantaged by being sufficiently masculinized or feminized within their own gender, in a way that is not in line with their conception of what and who they should be like? If you can juice your androgens, why can’t I? If you can compete in class with physical advantages, such a larger bones and more fast twitch muscles, thanks to the ability of technological modifications to make you eligible, why can’t someone else? 

    It’s wishful thinking to believe that you can radically alter the territory of eligibility without creating some conflicts. Especially when it comes to such essential criteria. My point isn’t to offer solutions, merely to point out the problems that inevitably arise and must be resolved. Regulations around gender and around accepted uses of technology are fundamental to the rules of play in sporting competitions. We can choose to rewrite the book if we wish. But it still has to be a coherent book in order for the game to work.