Hello @Cem82. Thank you for this reply. You've made a lot of points here which I would love to respond to in turn.
First of all, puberty blockers. What you seem to be saying is not so much that it is a grey area, but that you personally do not have the relevant expertise to be able to judge. I think it is important to point out that nobody really has this expertise. "Gender affirming medicine" truly is the wild west of modern medicine. You might argue that all forms of medicine were once new and experimental, and without such experimentation we would not have made the medical advancements we all benefit from today, and this would be a fair point.
However. Puberty blockers are drugs which target the pituitary gland to interfere with a person's endocrine system. They have a much longer history of use for other purposes. The most extreme example is that they have been used to chemically castrate sex offenders, rendering them unable to sustain an erection. They are sometimes used in the treatment of endometriosis in adult women, and also to delay puberty in cases of precocious puberty, which is where children start to experience the first signs of puberty before the age of 8. In such cases, patients are given the lightest possible dose of these drugs for the shortest possible treatment duration, because they are recognised to cause very severe negative side effects, including for both brain and bone health.
The practice of using them to block normal puberty in adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria is relatively recent and highly controversial. The evidence to support this practice comes largely from a study carried out in the Netherlands in the 1990s, meaning that the patients concerned are still relatively young. If, for example, it turned out that using these drugs for this purpose caused 100% of patients to develop Alzheimer's disease in their early 50s, we would still not know about it because it would not have happened yet. The sample size was quite small and consisted exclusively of young males who had experienced persistent gender dysphoria since early childhood.
This demographic is clearly not the same as the current largest demographic of trans identifying children, namely females with adolescent onset gender dysphoria, e.g. the Keira Bells of this world.
As more and more evidence about the impact of puberty blockers emerges, an increasing number of healthcare systems are deciding that the evidence is too poor and the risks are too great to support their continued use. The UK and France are following in the footsteps of the Scandinavian countries which, once early adopters of puberty blockers, are now clamping down on this practice. The USA, with its for-profit healthcare system and it's "if you can pay for it, you can have it" approach to, well, pretty much everything, is an outlier in this respect.
So no, puberty blockers are not so much a grey area as a massive great big red flashing light saying "danger!"
As an aside, whether or not you would consent to a young teen getting a tattoo is entirely irrelevant because in the UK it is illegal to get a tattoo below the age of 18, regardless of parental consent.
Regarding sports, I think it is even less of a grey area. Of course it is unfair to female athletes if someone who has been through male puberty is allowed to compete in their category. It is astonishing that this even needs to be said. As for trans women who have voluntarily used cross sex hormones to make them appear more feminine and as such are no longer competitive against male athletes, so bloody what? They chose to take the hormones. They still have an unfair advantage over women. The fact that they can no longer win in male categories is really neither here nor there. Whatever next? Should we also allow male athletes who have reduced their lung capacity by smoking 20 cigarettes a day to compete against women? What about men who are overweight? Or just short?
Arguably, the real injustice in transgender participation in sport is not trans women being excluded from female categories, but trans men who have taken testosterone being excluded from all competitive sport, even though they do not have any unfair advantage over men. Funnily enough, no one seems to care about them. I wonder why. (Spoiler: no one cares about them because they're female.)
A non gendered event is a good idea in theory. In fact, I am hugely in favour of it. Not least because male athletes, regardless of gender identity, would win in pretty much all categories, thereby demonstrating why we have sex based sporting categories in the first place. But funnily enough, there doesn't seem to be much demand from trans women athletes for these events. They want to compete in mainstream sport, in the women's categories.
Finally, nobody is accusing trans people of being potential rapists because they are trans. Trans women are potential rapists because they are male, and rape is a crime which can only be committed by a male perpetrator. As such, yes, we do think all male people are potential rapists. I do not believe my husband would ever rape anyone, or my father, or my brother. But women who are unknown to them have no way of knowing this. I would not want the gentlest man in the world, not even my own son if he identified as a trans woman, to be using women's single sex spaces, because as far as the female users of those spaces are concerned, he IS a potential rapist. And statistically, a large minority of the women using those spaces have in fact been raped or sexually assaulted by a man and are likely to find his presence traumatic and terrifying, even if I personally believe that he wouldn't harm a fly.
Nobody is denying that people with gender dysphoria exist, or that it can make their lives incredibly difficult and painful. But we should not be making law and policy which has a negative effect on over half the population, purely for the benefit of one small group. We shouldn't be doing it even if we could guarantee that all the people in that group are both genuine and harmless. And we certainly shouldn't be doing it in a way that allows people who are not genuine and actually incredibly dangerous to take advantage of the situation by claiming to be part of that group. This is really basic safeguarding.