So, I fully support trans people competing with cisgender people in sport. I also think there's loads of sports where you could gender desegregate it - basically all the sports that don't rely on strength and size.
So I said that bit, but then I also said that if you desegregated sports like swimming, football, rugby, etc etc, then you would never see a woman in a top team or on the podium at the Olympics ever again. Is that not factual? Even Ledecky, who is a ridiculously good swimmer, would not even make the men's swimming final at the Olympics.
I think you could desegregate sports at lower levels too - I've seen it done and experienced it. I was in a middle tier team in cricket with a bunch of dinguses, and the sometimes Women's A Team players would join our matches. They were as capable or better than the blokes most of the time. However, these women went on to play internationally, on TV, picking up contracts and stuff by playing against other women. If it was desegregated she'd be playing with shmucks like me who never even really liked cricket.
Am I wrong?
Chess is segregated by ELO, one could imagine the same sort of thing if segregation is “necessary “ for the good of a sport or whatever. Others have already mentioned weight/height classes, but performance-based metrics are routinely used already and they’re probably a better way to do it. Even when I played sports as a kid, there was sometimes division based on how skilled the players were.
This is pretty much Heath Davies' position in 'Beyond Trans: Does Gender Even Matter?' which is a good if fairly liberal and legalistic analysis of whether gender is important to public spaces and then he actually comes up with alternatives to currently gendered institutions. His section on sports is basically to have divisions by testosterone level (and other performance enhancing hormones) but it gets a bit more nuanced.