Here is a summary of some of the responses I made to the comments when I posted this Article on my Daily KOS page:

All I am saying is that that if we are going to have women’s sports as a separate category we must either 1) have criteria for deciding who is a woman other than the person’s say-so or 2) admit there is no reason for having a separate category for women’s sports. At the moment, we do have such criteria, which is probably why trans women don't win in any greater numbers than cis women. But if anyone could compete against women just by saying they are a woman, I doubt if that would still be true. For those who like data: This article gives some reasons why both Men and Transwomen have certain advantages not available to Ciswomen.

I don’t know whether these claims are true, but I do know that if these claims, or something like them, aren’t true, there is no reason to have separate categories for Men’s and Women’s sports. That’s a purely logical point. There are only three possible kinds of data relevant here: 1)Data which shows there are objective criteria that both Transwomen and Cismen have unfair advantages not available to ciswomen, 2) and those which contradict this claim. The first kind of data supports the claim that Transwomen should compete as men. The second kind supports the claim that there should be no gendered sports categories. I don’t know which is true. I just know that they can’t both be true.

The third possibility is that cismen possess these advantages and trans women don’t. If this is true, it has be based on some objective criteria about hormone injections weakening the muscles or something like that. It can’t be that all the male advantages magically disappear just because someone feels very strongly that they are a woman.

At the end of all this discussion, I am inclined to say that we should grasp for the first horn of my dilemma, and eliminate the distinction between men’s and women’s sports. We could however replace it with another set of distinctions which don’t specifically mention gender, but would still cover the inequities the old system was designed to rectify. Twin Grace has a link to an article about Ciswomen who were not allowed to compete as women because they had certain kind of masculine bone structure. You don’t have to say they’re really men to let them compete against men. However, If women like these are going to be in the category competing against men, why refer to the categories as “Men”? We could have lots of different categories, based on the science of what body types give advantage in what sport, and make no mention of gender in those categories. As someone else on this page pointed out, we already have weight class distinctions in some sports. Fencing has competitors group by age as well as gender. We could replace the gender distinction all together with distinctions of this sort carried to a higher level of refinement. This would eliminate the humiliation that can come whenever any committee makes a judgment about letting any woman, either Trans or Cis, compete as a woman.