A swimming league tried that and nobody showed up. There aren't enough of us. I was the only transgender athlete at my school as far as I know.

Some problems with this.

One, I'm a transgender woman and I'm roughly average for an athletic woman of my age. I'm about 5'7", 145lbs. The main thing I track is my running pace which hasn't dropped below 10:30 a mile in the 7 years I've been running 3x a week. I've competed in other sports against my cisgender female peers and perform either equally to or worse than them. I look about like this.

https://preview.redd.it/i12e567zpp6c1.jpeg?width=3072&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ede7df77ec1e1aad64a19c331571214e06c6bab5

In contrast, my cisgender boyfriend is also 5'7", but he weighs about 180 pounds, and can scoop me up practically one handed, while I can't even get him off the ground. He doesn't even work out or play sports.

Maybe transitioning when you're 45 and competing again 1 year into HRT is a bad look but I've been on HRT for 10 years and started when I was 17.

Why am I not allowed to play intramural soccer with my girlfriends? I mean come on, I'm not exactly destroying anyone at anything.

Two. Any advantage that you can list, cisgender women are allowed to have.

How come I am banned because I'm a threat to sports but a cisgender woman who is 6'1"(I'm citing a real person that went to my high school), 185 lbs, and has PCOS and has 10x the testosterone levels that I do (I've had SRS so I make almost none) is totally cool and good and allowed to play?

They aren't. It's just when any trans woman happens to do well they get media attention.

I'm a trans woman and an athlete. I've been on HRT for 10 years. I'm roughly average in height and weight for an athletic woman of my age, and I perform about equally to my cisgender female friends.

Neither of them even did that well! They got beat by many, many cisgender women.

Here's the thing jokes typically have to be funny

So, alright, trans people transition because of gender dysphoria, right? That's why transition exists in the first place. I didn't transition because I wanted to wear dresses, I transitioned because being in a masculine body was excruciatingly painful, to the point of being life threatening.

Let's assume someone is competing in the male division, and wants to transition specifically to be more highly ranked at the sport. That means going on HRT.

Option A is that they are a cisgender man who is now forced to be chemically castrated, ostracized by most of society, and have to put on a facade of being a woman despite identifying as a man. Which is just exactly what gender dysphoria is. They'd just become trans but in reverse, the pain of living in the wrong body and having people expect femininity from them would be horrific.

Reminder: it is not cool to be trans. It is not a hip fad.

Option B is that they transition and like being a woman and like what HRT does for them, in which case, they are a woman and therefore didn't have the wrong motive to transition in the first place.

While I do believe there must be tact in how long a trans woman must wait to start playing, the problem is that whatever you say you're controlling for by banning trans women, a hypothetical cisgender woman is allowed to possess the same advantage while still being allowed to play.

If the rhetoric was "let's ban all women above 5'9" and all women with a testosterone level above x nmol/dl" that would at least discriminate equally.

But I'm not banned from sports because of being 5'7" or weighing 145lbs, I'm banned from sports because I am trans.

That is literally the definition of discrimination