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Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

The issue is literally one of segregation.

You create, as a form of entertainment for the masses, an event for peak athletes to display their talent...by quirk of biology that means men.

You create a women's category to let them have their own entertainment niche.

You have in fact segregated sports, by gender, or sex, or whatever you want to call it.

Now there exist individuals who challenge the boundaries of this segregation. What do?

The realpolitik answer would be to segregate these individuals into yet another niche.

Of course the question arises, how many segregation categories to you create before it becomes all meaningless?

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> how many segregation categories to you create before it becomes all meaningless

Considering the fact that most women's leagues barely get any mainstream attention as is, I think any further fragmentation of sports isn't going to be sustainable.

Also, ignoring the commercial and entertainment aspect of sports, it's just really hard to organize local leagues if they only serve a small portion of the population. Like, even in a large metropolitan area, how many transgender people are there? Of those, how many are interested in a particular sport? Of those, how many are interested enough to form a club?

The problem arises because Trans people in the west (ironically) insist on a binary definition.

Here in Pakistan, trans people have fought for (and gained) the right to NOT be part of the binary system; so here we have 'M' for men, 'W' for women and 'X' for trans people. (Homosexuality is still illegal, btw)

Or to make it more explicit, the tagline 'trans women are women' would be considered transphobic here, because women is considered to be synonymous with cis women, but they are trans, they earnt the right for that X in their sex column.

It's not like we are a bastion of trans rights here, so the issue of bathrooms ( they are required to have their own, iirc, but I doubt compliance is prevalent) and sports (haven't heard anything about trans people in sports) hasn't arisen yet.

I feel trans people in the west will have to come to the same realisation that their trans counterparts in the east have; the binary definition is not fit for purpose.

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