I believe there is a suspicion that allowing transitioned men to play in gender-protected divisions is akin to letting an MLB player play in a little league game. To be honest, I am personally concerned about this - not necessarily in DG, but in contact sports (hockey, MMA, etc.)
I'm hesitant to even address this - one's
suspicion or
perception of something does not make it so. And it is problematic that the
perception of a transwoman competing in women's divisions is seen as akin to an adult man competing in a division for teenage boys.
As I previously said acceptance rarely comes in the initial generation. These things take time in order to work themselves out in the minds of the public, and sometimes, it never fully dissipates. Again, as previously said, there was not immediate acceptance of Jackie Robinson or his peers who came later, and to this day, there are still people who insist it is not fair for white athletes to compete against black ones.
I'm not sure where we draw the line on co-mingling male and female athletes - is it with contact sports? What about golf, tennis, weightlifting? Are chess and racing cars considered sports?
Again, this is problematic. If you are equating a transwoman as a male athlete playing against female athletes, we're already not participating in the same conversation.
This is a "new" world that isn't entirely clear. One could argue we need inclusion to study the impact, but what happens if/when a cis woman boxer is killed in the ring or paralyzed from an open-ice hit? Does it make sense to under-correct before we over-corect?
Worst-case scenario is always brought up here. I'm not sure why this is. Everyone wants to talk about Fallon Fox broke the orbital bone of an opponent while overlooking that plenty of cis-women break the bones of other cis-women. Somehow, it is significant that a transwoman did it, but in a contact sport, that kind of injury is inevitable. It's going to happen. It would be statistically more interesting if it never happened, but that's not the case at all. And when a cis-woman does it, it almost goes without notice. For example, Miesha Tate had an orbital bone break in a match against Sara McCann, and this is practically never mentioned.
Stories become sensationalized, overblown, and suddenly something that is a statistical probability is treated as something that never happens and OMG how could this have been allowed to happen?
I don't know how to say this any clearer. Competition isn't fair. We try to make it reasonably fair. That's why we have divisions. People have advantages, and they always will. The question isn't whether someone with an advantage should be immediately considered non-eligible, but if that advantage is sufficient to unbalance things.
The majority of people who rage against Natalie or Chloe or whomever don't care for nuance. And honestly - let's postulate that when sufficient evidence is gathered it is determined their ability is within the spectrum of other women, this won't satisfy the people who don't want Natalie or Chloe competing. Because it honestly isn't about fairness to them. It's about the ick factor.
And that perception, that suspicion, isn't going to go away any more than we can make flat-earthers accept that an image of earth taken from space is real.