What's confusing me is we don't care about "normal" (whatever that means.....even the word is dripping in bias) m and fs are doing on the youth level by taking testosterone to outright cheat. If you aren't going after the cheaters, why do you care about the trans kid.
on the college level, where we test, I actually do get that. A testosterone (as opposed to a biology test) actually makes sense. It's actually what we have now. The question then becomes is whether protocols (whether testosterone blockers, hormones or surgey) can, bell curve to bell curve, reduce the performance of a MTF so there is no undo advantage. We know already they can't compete with the cis males on active testosterone. That's been established already. What we didn't know was the FTM don't gain the corresponding advantage (which has us rethinking some of those assumptions). We also didn't know that the impact of puberty would be so severe and long lasting on the MTF. So, the question becomes can any of the protocols balance, or if not, can separate leagues be established. For some like running and jumping, the answer (which we don't know fully yet) will likely be we can't balance. For some, like team sports other than aggregate race teams or basketball, the answer is likely it doesn't matter. For some, like basketball, there will likely be tough cases on which reasonable people will disagree and may require a more individualized approach, case to case.
