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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm also torn on this issue. On the one hand, everyone - including transgender - should have the right to compete on sports teams.  Saying "oh they can just go play on a community team" is the same justification that led to school only offering men's teams.  Title IX was an attempt to address that for women, but now trans women are fighting the same battle.

On the other hand, it really is unfair and unsafe to biological women to have trans women playing on their team.

I doubt they'd be accepted on the men's team.  That's not a solution either.

And there just aren't enough trans people to make a third league feasible.

So... Why not eliminate gender from the equation?  The reasons for having separate men's and women's leagues are valid physical reasons without having to call it gender.  Make a "lightweight" league: under a certain height and weight (depending on age), potentially other factors such as body fat (typically much lower in men) or strength (although that would be hard to measure accurately and fairly).  This league would predominately be comprised of women, but possibly also open to the smaller men who previously had not had a chance on any sports teams.  The "heavyweight" league would look more like the traditional men's league, but also potentially some of the bigger/stronger women (think Serena Williams). Trans women would go onto whichever team they physically match.  To really capture everyone, you could even have an ultralightweight league for the smallest females, if there was enough demand for it.[/quote]

It's an interesting idea, but there's no way to make competition between similar sized women and men equal. The tennis match between Braasch and the Williams sisters shows it. He was old, out of shape, they were prime. He's not much bigger than them. But he's male, which means his bones are denser, his lungs are larger, his muscles larger. He has the benefit of testosterone. And he won, handily.

My teenage daughter is not a small girl, at 5'8 and around 145 lbs. Put her up against a teenage boy of similar size, and you still have to account for the denser bones, the increased lung capacity, the increased muscular strength, everything testosterone does for the male body that it doesn't do for the female body. A head-to-head collision, not uncommon in soccer when two people are going for the ball at once, would be horrible for my daughter going against the denser bones and significantly stronger musculature of a male body, even a similarly sized male body.

If you had open soccer try outs in HS and you divided the groups by height, say everyone above 5'7 on one team, everyone below on the other, the top team would very likely contain no girls, and the bottom team would likely be half boys (biologically, gender identity is irrelevant for this point).

That's not good for girls and women, even if it's good for trans people. It's not a reasonable solution.

Why do you think it would be an issue to have biological boys and men accepted on the teams meant for biological boys and men? Why is the solution to then essentially disband girls and womens teams? Why must girls and women always be the ones who accommodate? In this case, I believe biological boys and men are capable of understanding that gender expression is a choice, and a great soccer player is a great soccer player.[/quote]

This last post is an exceptionally strong and well thought out, compassionate, logical argument.[/quote]

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