I wish that article had been able to change my mind.<p>I am a big supporter of trans rights. Trans women are women. Gender is between the ears, not between the legs.<p>Women's athletics is about both sex and gender. It recognizes that women play sports in a somewhat different way from men. Partly because the bodies of cis women are different from those of men, and partly because of the culture that arises around that. Sometimes the whole sport is different because of it -- women's gymnastics is radically different from men's, and figure skating only a bit less so. Women's basketball and soccer are noticeably different, and interesting to watch because of the differences that go beyond strength and speed.<p>Defining "women" in that athletic context has thus always been tricky. We've always had intersex athletes, and outliers whose bodies were recognizably female. But they were rare enough that it didn't force itself to the front of our minds.<p>Trans people are more numerous, and will become even more so. I don't think anybody would consider it a good thing if all of the women's records were dominated by athletes assigned male at birth. That is not yet the situation, but it's not hard to imagine that it could be.<p>I wish the article had been able to make a better case that it wouldn't be a problem. I absolutely support the fact that Lia is a woman. She should be able to participate in women's sports as a woman -- because women play sports differently. It is great that she gets to be on the podium with other women.<p>I don't, however, know how best to handle that. A separate set of cis-women's events or cis-women's records is crude and awkward. Leaving cis women out of the record books will make nobody happy.<p>I also don't like borrowing this trouble. Focus on this is, I fear, more about finding ways to marginalize trans people than real concern for women. So I really wish the article had left me with a knock-down way to agree with Lia.