> 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.

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)

> Yes, but this is a choice.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

That's why it's time to stop talking about all of this as a bulk category. Different situations care about different aspect of sex/gender.

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.

> Transsexuality, non-binary etc. are facts

Yes, facts, but not choices.

It’s interesting how different the perspectives are between actual athletes and some people who have just thought about the issues.

Do elaborate please.

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

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.