// Ok lets say I accept that for a minute. Do you think they should be allowed to compete unfairly in women's sports? We are only talking about tennis on this thread but what about say boxing? //
Depends on what you mean by "unfairly", which strikes me as begging the question. I agree that there should be some amount of restrictions, based on, say, a minimum period of hormone therapy. Where I have a particular problem with many of the current rules is that they are firstly reactionary -- wildly exaggerating a fuss over a single result in order to change rules that had been arrived at after a lengthy consultation -- and secondly more than a little dishonest. Most of the outcry comes from people who don't even accept the legitimacy of being trans at all (see, eg, Naomi's comments of being trans as "hav[ing] a problem", or "living a lie"). In that case, the choice of sports as a battleground is convenient to try and "stop" the acceptance of transgender people in any walk of life. This also explains why some of the recent outcry concerns examples which either don't intersect with professional sports (one fuss about a transgender woman competing in a *charity* run, for example, is particularly manufactured), or don't intersect with sports where the chromosomal sex should matter.
As a clear minimum, anyone who has socially but not medically transitioned (male to female) ought to accept that they can't compete in strength-based professional sports, which includes tennis in the current example. I care a great deal about women's tennis, so I'm well aware of the differences between the men's and women's game, and of the history of transgender people in tennis -- there's basically only one of note, Renee Richards (the fact that there's only one shows to a good extent how manufactured all of this controversy is in the first place). In that sense, it's clear that most professional male tennis athletes would enjoy success beyond their ability if they competed in the women's game, whether that's because of allowing people to socially transition and compete without any medical intervention or by just abandoning the idea of separate men's and women's tours altogether.
But I despair at those who use sports as a proxy for debating all aspects of transgender life. It's a niche issue, and should never have received this much attention.