I’ll answer the rest later, but I am not saying that it forces no gatekeeping, only that the gatekeeping is overwhelmingly unlikely to be sufficient for fairness.
I’m pretty sure, though IA still NAL, that the EO is quite clearly saying that the state can’t demand that transgender female athletes choose one of those two options. If they identify as girls, and have the right to live and be treated as girls, then they can’t be banned from sports competition just for being anomalously big and strong girls.
Yes, that means that we’re going to have to ponder the requirements of fairness in girls’ sports competition involving a small minority of anomalously big and strong girls. But what we can’t do, according to the EO AFAICT, is declare “Ha ha take-backsies, we’re not actually going to consider you as girls in this context after all, so we don’t have to let you play on the girls’ team!”
I agree that taking specific gender-label names off the team designations would be a help. If everybody, whether boy, girl, genderfluid, nonbinary or whatever, has the right to play competitive sports in a competition category based on specific physiological ability criteria, then we can quit worrying about who gets pink uniforms and who gets blue ones.
Yes, and since you agree this EO prevents the resolution that I think is the only fair one, and the only one that doesn’t harm cis girls and women, do you finally understand why I object to it?
Oh, I understood from the get-go that you object to it because you think it’s unfair to cis girls and women to require them to compete against trans girls and women. My objection to your objection is, and has been from the get-go, that you are too willing to tolerate blatant discrimination against trans girls and women to avoid what you consider this intolerable unfairness to cis girls and women.
Speaking as a cisgender woman, I agree with DSeid that the unfairness of discrimination against transgender female athletes is a worse problem than the unfairness of some cisgender female athletes being outcompeted by a small minority of transgender female ones.
But I also think, as I’ve been saying all along, that there are probably a lot of reasonable ways to mitigate unfairness to cis athletes without discriminating against trans ones. It will be interesting to see what specific policy recommendations and adjustments come out of this EO.
(And I would just like to say BTW that I sincerely appreciate your taking the trouble to use more egalitarian language with references to distinctions between, e.g., “trans girls” and “cis girls”, rather than, e.g., “trans people” and “girls”. I know I’ve been a bit caustic on occasion about your somewhat loaded terminology because it seemed to me that you were doing it to be defiantly insulting and weren’t going to change it. I was wrong, and I apologize.)
To be more precise, the only one that has no potential to, and to a small number at relatively elite levels, and of much less significance in some sports than other. But that quibble aside -
Do YOU understand the highly significant harms caused to a greater number who are not at elite levels by categorical exclusionary policies, and why many of us object to that?
Transgender teens attempt suicide roughly twice as often as cisgender youth do. Marginalization, stigmatization, and exclusion from activities open to others of their self-perceived gender identity are clear contributors to that very unfortunate fact. Most do not want do be stars … really they don’t want to stick out at all. But they do want to be accepted members of the team, to experience camraderie with female friends, which for many girls includes on sports teams.
Accepting the harm of stigmatization and marginalization, of decreased physical activity even, requires a burden of proof that there is greater harm caused by disallowing exclusion. That is the default.
Here’s a good overview of the subject:
Here’s the most recent study:
Here’s an older one:
This is a paper that has links to studies that AIUI were not specifically looking at performance but may have relevant data:
Usain Bolt has a lot of advantages over me in running, Mike Trout in baseball,Patrick Mahomes in football. That’s not fair, they shouldnt get to compete because their genes are better than mine. Right? 
Look, some people do possess faster, stronger more agile DNA. That’s great for them. And it’s not unfair.
I think they found a gene that is in all the really fast runners, shoudl we DNA test runners and if they have that gene- ban them? That’s a unfair advantage, right?
I dont care, let them play. Pick which gender they prefer and have fun.
Is athletic performance determined by genetics?: MedlinePlus Genetics.
“The 577RR genotype is associated with a high proportion of fast-twitch fibers and is seen more commonly in athletes who rely on strength or speed, such as short-distance runners.”
There, we need to ban athletes with the 577RR genotype, it is unfair to those that dont have it.
If there were any groups pushing for this then I would be more reassured. Mostly we see LGBT groups pushing for the most extreme position - no requirements other than affirmation - with no opposition other than religious people who really are motivated by transphobia. There is no desire to find a compromise, and there are no groups really fighting for the rights of cis women and girls. A fair outcome seems unlikely in these circumstances.
Surely it would be possible to have different rules for casual and competitive sports?
I really must go to bed now, it’s got very late. Goodnight all.
So please note some contained in what you linked to above.
The first citation was very clear to state how little is actually known.
Note, this is a discussion regarding those who have not only completed puberty as males, but been adults with male adult level testosterone for years. Its relevance to High School or even most college athletics is questionable.
Same with that BMJ study - looking at adult transwomen who after gender affirming hormone therapy no longer had any advantage in the strength tests of sit-ups and push-ups but had some residual advantage in a 1.5 mile run.
Your last citation? Well it was one of the articles @Novelty_Bobble had linked to that I encouraged you to read … makes me wonder if you bothered to even look.
Not exactly supporting your position.
Most HS sports are “competitive” … but agreed that elite level competition could have different guidelines than typical levels.
I can’t tell if your concern here is that genuinely transgender athletes should have to go through a stricter verification process than “affirmation”, or that cisgender male athletes will deliberately fake being transgender female in order to outcompete female athletes.
The National Federation of State High School Associations says:
I really don’t think that we’re suffering from a dearth of responsible people keeping an eye on transgender athlete participation in school athletics to see how the “competitive equity” issues shake out.
But ISTM that you’re at best premature when you wish for “groups pushing for this”—pushing for what, exactly? All these suggestions about excluding this group or that group of transgender athletes from this level or that level of competition are being batted around in what is basically an informational vacuum.
We don’t really know yet, as your own cites confirm, how much advantage a given transgender female athlete in a given sport has over a given cisgender female one. There are several transgender female athletes dominating their competition, and there are also lots of transgender female athletes who lose a lot.
I’m all for encouraging the notion of shifting our concept of sports competition categories away from gender labels and toward specific ability criteria. But ISTM that it’s way too soon to be demanding some particular set of ironclad rules governing the participation of transgender athletes.
And, thankfully, no one is trying to make that impossible!
I mean, you might be totally in favor of children being allowed to take puberty blockers … you are right?
'Cause not being in favor of that, or being in favor of it while not opposing efforts to ban puberty blockers would make ‘allowing only those who have not been through male puberty’ a rather disingenuous position.
Are we as a society interested in fairness for the transgendered individuals, or fairness for the, for lack of a better term, typical individuals? Because those are at least partly opposing goals.
In the global state of human affairs this whole thing is a teapot tempest. Conversely, for the specific transgendered individuals who are interested in athletics it looms very large. As well for those typical individuals who may take advantage of the new opportunity to compete cross-gender, or be taken advantage of by those taking advantage of said opportunity.
Perhaps we should divide all sports into 3 “classes”. Unambiguously male from birth to today, unambiguously female from birth to today, and “all other”.
That formulation would insulate the far more numerous typicals from the cynical cheaters, yet doesn’t exclude the complicated cases that truly exist and always have, even if our society has lacked the science and the moral wisdom to recognize them as such much before the present day.
See, I’m just not sure such a category exists (or at least that such a category exists and is worth contorting the system around—obviously we can evaluate bad faith claims just as we do now in every other sphere). I’m not even satisfied that trans women competing as, you know, uh… women has actually posed or is likely to pose a threat to… uh… women. Themselves included.
Maybe we should just treat them like the women they are to alleviate the real, actual harm that is being done day in and day out to a marginalized community, and then deal with the later ramifications if and when someone can actually show a real competing harm, rather than just conjure up the specter of an imaginary boogeyperson?
I’m just laying out the landscape, not suggesting a route through it. I suspect you’re completely right. At least in the early days.
if we imagine a future world where women’s pro sports pay a hefty fraction (or better yet at parity) compared to men’s sports, I think it’s all-but guaranteed that the entirety of women competing in those sports will turn out to be ordinary males posing as transwomen. This will be the strata of males who don’t quite make the pros as male, but can utterly dominate the bio-typical females.
But we’re not there today. So better, as you say, to fix the inequities we see now and be prepared to swat the unwanted side effects as and when those actually appear. All of human improvement, whether of machines or of societies, is a matter of solving the ever smaller problems left over after we swat the currently biggest ones. It may well be 3 steps forward & 1 back, but that still nets to 2 steps forward.
As with all things in human nature and human society, we’re totally used to accepting the bad consequences of the problems we have and disproportionately fear the bad consequences of problems we don’t yet have but can readily imagine.
A potential hypothetical perhaps of interest for a very small number of adult elite level athletes … but not having anything to do with even any speculative claims about the executive order in the op.
Neither extreme affects the fairness for the typical individual. The typical girl athlete is in the middle of the pack. And she will remain in the middle of the pack whether there’s some super talented cisgirl in her school, or a transgirl who is bigger and stronger than she is, or if she’s in a school with neither of those.
The people who are affected are on the one hand trans girls, who effectively can’t compete in many scenarios, and the elite cisgirl athletes, who might not win the medal if she has to compete against a transgirl.
That’s a small group either way.
Do the truly elite sports accept federal money? Professional sports mostly don’t, but maybe the Olympic team does? I’m not certain what the impact of this executive order is going to be on sports.
I’ll dispute that. The group of trans girls who may be excluded from competing in many scenarios is not huge, but it is not small, and relative to the number of elite cisgirl athletes who might possibly be at some competitive disadvantage, an extremely large number.
Probably just different terminology, rather than real disagreement. I don’t think more than a percent or so of the population is trans. That’s a small number. Maybe i should say a small fraction.
And what fraction of the population has the potential to be at the top of -some- sport? I would guess that’s a comparable fraction. There are a lot of sports, after all.
My main point was that the typical girl is completely unaffected, either way. It’s a red herring to think that a typical girl is hurt even a tiny bit by allowing a trans girl who went through male puberty to join her sport. Because the difference between being the 12th best swimmer in you class and the 13th best swimmer is totally inconsequential. The camaraderie and regular exercise and the thrill of competition are all completely unaffected