I understand that nice people don't enjoy horrible spectacles like the current furore in the Olympic women's boxing. I agfee that the focus on individual athletes is horrific, and leads to trial by photograph,which is ludicrous and deeply unfeminist; ive seen female athletes go through the same, including on MN, though you might notice that those threads get big numbers of responses telling the posters they're wrong. I can see why people decide that we should just eliminate all sex categories to avoid this awfulness.
The focus should be in the weakness of the IOC processes in this one area, not on individual athletes or on eliminating meaningful categories. Every athlete at the Olympics has to reach a qualifying standard. In order to have meaningful, high level competition over a big range of sports, that's the route they have gone down. They could have a small number of sports and welcome all comers, with huge numbers of heats until the top competitors emerge. But they don't. To become an Olympian, you have to prove your ability. The IOC has no problem imposing that. They also impose and confirm weight limits where appropriate. They also ensure drug testing. All fine.
But in sex... no. The IOC just say, as long as their passport says F, that's fine. It's pathetic. Essentially the experience of one athlete with a DSD (no idea which DSD and it doesn't matter) who battled endlessly to have their documentation sex accepted despite failing gender tests, and who became part of the IOC committee addressing this, led to the 2003 decision that documentation sex was good enough, and because in 2003 there was no country that didn't require gender surgery for documentation change, surgical status was included in that decision. Since then, starting in the UK, surgical status has been progressively removed from transition documentation requirements in many countries, leading to the 2015 decision to stop requiring any surgical change in favour of hormonal change (headed up by Chris Mosier, a female athlete whose subsequent peak in open competition was doing OK but not excitingly in an Olympic trial). NOT ONCE in any of this process has women's sport been considered important in its own right - and to me this is where the IOC have failed, and why the article posted has looked in the wrong direction
I've told this story on here before. I was 16th once...
In my sport at university, there was a top rowing boat of 8 and a reserve boat of 8. I tried out for 6 months for the squad. I knew I was borderline, but found each week that I was surviving the cut of competitors (being in sport you're quite used to this sort of process). I did what I could, trained 4 hours a day, cut out alcohol etc, lived and breathed it. I just made it into the last place in the reserve boat, the 16th spot. And that changed everything for me; the experience of better coaching, better competition, better training, changed my life forever. (Incidentally, as a women's eight we did practice starts against a men's pair. Eight against two.)
In 2015 a transwoman was selected for that reserve boat. But I don't see that as wonderful inclusion, because I think about the woman who was excluded. If 2015 had been my year, she would have been me. The reality of my female body would have been ignored in favour of a male. That is NOT feminist and it's not sporting.
Women's sport is for women.