However, either obesity is a disability, in which case, perhaps the ADA or equivalent could be used to force airlines to provide accomodation, or it is not a protected class, in which case, airlines should force them to purchase two seats.

In sports, there are leagues and classes of competition that attempt to provide a "minimum platform" for teams to compete. That's why teams move up and down from the soccer premier leagues etc.

The problem/issue of trans-gendered individuals being on teams they don't "belong" to is going to be changed over the next decades given that genetic modifications and enhancements are likely to be available via CRISPR etc.

Drugs are banned in sport to avoid people using "artifical" enhancements to their innate trained abilities. If someone gets genetic modification to enhance, say, their muscles abilities to use energy, how are you going to police that?

Have everyone playing submit their genome for examination?

> Have everyone playing submit their genome for examination?

My point is is that it does not matter. What is current top competition sport is not natural anymore so I do not really care about whether they take drugs (illegal today, maybe legal tomorrow) or not. Or modify they genome.

Wasn't there a case of a (South African?) athlete who was asked for a sample of their DNA to check weather they were a man or a woman? (it was not that long time ago I think)

Two things:

This is a minority viewpoint. I believe most sports fans and participants want sports to remain free of exogenous performance enhancing drugs.

The second: the situation you describe would disadvantage everyone who does not engage in maximizing their use of such PEDs, and the sport in question would rapidly be transformed from what it is now into something vastly different, as the people willing to ingest these modifications would quickly displace the ones that aren't, or don't embrace the practice as fully.

That may be fine for you, but it is a big change, and many people like it the way it is now.

Personally, I agree with you. There should probably be a drugs league in various sports where people get as insanely artificially enhanced as human bodies can support, I might even watch that despite my general aversion to sports just to see the extreme tech involved. But it's absolutely silly to equate that to what is happening today because "today's athletes are not natural". It's not the same thing at all.

Drug league could have people dying mid competition, as they took too many drugs that they had a heart attack when trying to go all out, and that would create so much backlash and vicarious trauma that it gets shut down hard. I think it's the main reason why it doesn't exist.

I imagine that many of the people who would participate are already taking these things (these are not the people competing professionally today). Perhaps mainstreaming it would incentivize more research into safety and sustainability around artificially pushing humans beyond their current physical limits.

Given the extreme competitive and monetary pressure already involved in sports, as well as expectations of audience, I question how much we can talk about consent and lack of coercion. If a drug league would exist, players would be pressured to take part to the very limit of what's legal, health be damned - as they already are in regular leagues.

That's Caster Semenya.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya

Pertinent bit:

In April 2018, the IAAF announced new "differences of sex development" rules that required athletes with specific disorders of sex development, testosterone levels of 5 nmol/L and above, and certain androgen sensitivity to take medication to lower their testosterone levels, effective beginning 8 May 2019. Due to the narrow scope of the changes, which also apply to only those athletes competing in the 400m, 800m, and 1500m, many people thought the rule change was designed specifically to target Semenya.

On 19 June 2018, Semenya announced that she would legally challenge the IAAF rules. On 1 May 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected her challenge, paving the way for the new rules to come into effect on 8 May 2019. During the legal challenge by Semenya, the IAAF amended the regulations to exclude hyperandrogenism associated with the 46,XX karyotype and clarified that the disorders of sex development affected by the regulations are specific to the 46,XY karyotype. The legal case divided commentators such as Doriane Coleman, who testified for the IAAF, arguing that women's sport requires certain biological traits, from commentators such as Eric Vilain, who testified for Semenya, arguing that "sex is not defined by one particular parameter ... for many human reasons, it's so difficult to exclude women who've always lived their entire lives as women — to suddenly tell them 'you just don't belong here.'"

Semenya has appealed the decision to the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. On 3 June 2019, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court advised that they had "super-provisionally instructed the IAAF to suspend the application of the 'Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification for athletes with differences of sex development' with respect to the claimant [Semenya]" until the court decides whether to issue an interlocutory injunction. On 30 July 2019, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court reversed its earlier ruling that had suspended the Court of Arbitration for Sport decision and the IAAF rules. For that reason, Semenya missed the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha in October 2019, while continuing her appeal.

In July 2019, Semenya said that the ongoing issue has "destroyed" her "mentally and physically".

we currently ban steroids and most performance-enhancing substances in elite sports

Trans is the same thing, but on a genetic level. It alters the state of competition to give advantage to the new entrant. It follows that it would be banned on the same grounds under current rules.

Either we accept all modification in sports, or we dont

We don’t need to engage in flame wars or virtue signaling or any of these asinine debates.

People got along with their lives just fine for thousands of years without feeling compelled to debate a stranger from hundreds of miles away for 10 minutes about theoreticals that scarcely affect their daily lives.

But the social media and advertising companies can’t have that. No, we as a society need to be juiced up on fear and hate 24/7 to keep the eyeballs moving and the profits flowing.

Fact is the world is full of shitty people and ya gotta pick your battles. In most cases, the winning move is not to play.

That’s debatable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary). They even went out and tried to kill strangers hundreds of miles away (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war)

Many of those were in times when it took a serious commitment to even travel that far, let alone to wage war. It probably helped that staying put didn’t guarantee a quiet life, either.

This would lead to a large number of injuries and overdoses because of the drug use. IIRC this was happening in soccer with heart attacks happening because of drugs.

The distinction between men and women teams is arbitrary but fairly sensible. If you didn't separate them then you'd have men at the top and women at the bottom, which does not fun make.

That said, I have no clue how to solve the transperson distinction in sports.

Yes, but this is a choice. We still like to imagine that sports must be "natural". There is nothing natural in how the top performers are bred (my wife was a national junior champion and in the very top of Europe and did not continue despite being invited to the national team - all the fun of sports is gone).

Since we accept that we breed people that do competitive sport I see no reason why not to give them all the opportunities. This includes taking risk with their health and life.

The only problem is that sport starts at 4 years old and there is a risk of parents who would be ready for anything for their children to be sport heroes.

My children did al lot of sports and they stopped after their black belt in karate because it was not fun anymore. They were not really interested by the competition so it did not matter. They love sport. I play volleyball in an amateur team that almost always loses. But the fun is incredible.

> The distinction between men and women teams is arbitrary but fairly sensible. If you didn't separate them then you'd have men at the top and women at the bottom, which does not fun make.

I know but since it looks like the gender is becoming a mater of choice, I do not know how this will be deal with.

I was thinking the same thing when I read somewhere that the "appartenance to a racial group" in the US is by choice as well. I wonder why some, say, white people do not assess themselves as "Afro-American" to make use of the positive discrimination for admission at universities (or whatever this is called in the US)

When _some_ make this choice to be at the top, _all_ must make this choice to be at the top. At that point it's a roulette of who will dare take the most drugs and live to win.

> I see no reason why not to give them all the opportunities.

Some are way more harmful than others, and we should take that into account.

EDIT:

> I know but since it looks like the gender is becoming a mater of choice, I do not know how this will be deal with.

Apart from some radical groups thinking so, gender is not really becoming a choice.

This is exactly what happens in sport today. Some made the choice to make it all of their life and train from dusk to dawn, eat some kind of protein powders that bring in the exact amount of nutriments etc.

The others must do the same to beat them.

I really see no difference between allowing to have a nutritionist, a personal coach, a bioengineer and access to all kind of legal substances that do not exist in nature and just let it go, grab some popcorn and see.

This is still a choice, a tough one, but a choice.

Then we will have these Roman-like competitions where some die and some survive (with the difference that they choose it knowingly) and the teams of people who instead of watching sport on TV will go to play an amateur match themselves.

I do not like competitive sport because it is made to look like something natural while it is not. The same way I do not care about boxers who get Parkinsons after repeated hits in their head or the ones who climb towers to make a selfie on the top and slip, I do not care about these who decided to modify their physiology to be the best at one specific precise action.

It ends with US universities "graduating" people who can barely write their name because they were good in basketball. The person who graduated in the same major as them and had to work (and get into the university in the first place) may not be happy. But there is money behind so who cares.

One of those has a high chance of directly killing you, the others don't, that's my point.

Transsexuality, non-binary etc. are facts. They are more or less legalized (it depends on the country) but I think that at some point it is not the genome that is going to decide but a personal choice.

I do not want to discuss whether this is good or bad, just the fact that quantitative biological data are not absolute measures anymore.

In sports, it isn't really relevant what a person thinks about themselves. Gender is used as a proxy for expected performance envelope - you don't want to mix people with radically different characteristics, because that would not make for fair competition. I'm guessing that eventually we'll stop talking about "men" and "women" teams, and figure out new terms that directly reference the relevant biological characteristics.

Yes, facts, but not choices.

It doesn’t seem that hard: just create explicit performance classes instead of using gender as a proxy for a performance class. There’s already precedent for this in at least combat sports where competitors are separated into weight classes.