According to Google, this is Title IX as it was applied to sports.
---
Title IX has helped focus attention on meeting the needs of women interested in athletics and helped education officials to recognize their responsibilities regarding the provision of equal athletic opportunity.
---
Women weren't - and still aren't - banned from playing men's sports. Why wasn't that seen as "equal athletic opportunity"? The answer was obvious to all at the time - but fewer appear to understand it now. If you were born biologically female, you were not underrepresented on sports teams that received college scholarships (and also from special consideration for admittance if sports scholarships were not allowed, such as the Ivy League schools) - you were almost non-existent. Simple biology explained the difference.
What has Title IX accomplished?
---
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/2...impacts-womens-equality-in-college-athletics/
Title IX banned sex discrimination — but
disparities still exist between men's and women's sports at the collegiate level.
A U.S. Department of Education report from 2019
found that 87% of NCAA schools "offered disproportionately higher rates of athletic opportunities to male athletes compared to their enrollment."
Pepperdine University's student-run news organization
reports that female students make up 53% of the student body at Division I colleges — yet Division I athletic departments devote only 36% of their budgets to women's sports. That adds up to an extra $133 million each year for men's sports compared with women's sports at the Division I level alone.
---
Now if you are born biologically female, you are still significantly less likely to get money for sports - but it's worlds better than it was. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that biological women are still not playing at the college or professional level in men's sports. That's because it's (still) an athletic advantage in these sports to be born biologically male. Let's not forget why we have separated girls' and boys' sports in the first place.
Regarding transitioning with HRT, etc. - that is well beyond my expertise. I'll leave that up to the governing bodies to determine whether it is an advantage and under what conditions to allow it. Here's another article with a somewhat different take from the article posted by
@dk_b. I include part of it, but the entire article is a good read.
---
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/us/lia-thomas-women-sports.html
Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., studies the physiology of male and female athletes. He sees in competitive swimming a petri dish. It is a century old, and the sexes follow similar practice and nutrition regimens.
Since prepubescent girls grow faster than boys, they have a competitive advantage early on. Puberty washes away that advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”
The records for elite adult male swimmers are on average 10 percent to 12 percent faster than the records of elite female swimmers, an advantage that has held for decades.
Little mystery attends to this. Beginning in the womb, men are bathed in testosterone and puberty accelerates that. Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.
“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Joyner noted. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”
When a male athlete transitions to female, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, requires a year of hormone-suppressing therapy to bring down testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. put this in place to diminish the inherent biological advantage held by those born male.
Ms. Thomas followed this regimen.
But peer reviewed studies show that even after testosterone suppression, top trans women retain a substantial edge when racing against top biological women.
---
dcenquirer.com
