There may be sports where the distributions really are pretty much disjoint! By my priors, I'm skeptical, but that could be wrong, for some sports. 1/

And sure, for such a sport you could argue very little is lost segregating by sex or gender (or at least was until mainstreaming of trans rendered the categories less distinct). 2/

Even in such a sport, it's always possible for an extraordinary person to emerge from the inferior gender. In these cases, is the individual injustice of exclusion outweighed by the easy sorting that sex (perhaps once upon a time) enables? I guess that's a values question. 3/

But then we find that in sex segregated sport, such extraordinary individuals sometimes are banned from competing within their own sex category, cf Caster Semenya edition.cnn.com/2023/11/06/s... 4/

Given the existence of such outliers, and now the existence of trans people as well who further muddle whatever imperfect distinction across distributions that once existed, why isn't choosing more direct correlates of capability a better approach to defining like that ought compete with like? /fin