As possibly the only resident powerlifter here.. I say "Yes let them lift", with a sprinkle of "It's tricky". When it comes to team/contact sports, I understand (on paper) the need for division. Rugby: When I was in high school, the girls 1st XV (18 years old) challenged the boys 1st XV to a friendly match. The girls team were back to back regional champs, and had competed in the national comp, narrowly losing the final. They were extremely good, and a number of them have since gone on to play professionally. The teachers and coaches of both teams, said "No". So the girls challenged the 2nd XV (still 18 years, but less good) and again, were told "No."

They made their way down to the Under 15s side (14/15 years old) and they were met with a reluctant "Allright". Come match day, what would have been a 70 minute game of two 35 minute halves, was called off at half time as the boys side racked up 50 points and battered their opponents. It wasn't even close to a competition, and the boys side was reluctant throughout, opting to just attack the gaps and avoid contact as much as possible. Now, as the women's game has grown into a full-fledged professional setup here in New Zealand, we're now seeing phenomenal athletes get the air-time, money and fame they deserve. You couldn't fuckin' pay me to get in front of Portia Woodman. But splitting the genders in a high contact sport makes sense, cause Portia Woodman would get demoed in the men's game, and Portia Woodman is a terrifying powerhouse.

The only question I think worth asking around this in team/contact sports is, "Is anyone going to get hurt by this?". Be it a trans woman playing with women or a trans man playing against men. I will note I never see the latter of these situations making headlines. Nobody seems worried if a small trans dude wants to kick it with his brethren. It's always the trans women wanting to play with her sisters that gets people out of sorts. We certainly aren't seeing a sudden influx of men transitioning to women to play high level rugby with high level athletes bodies. So even then, my only question isn't likely ever going to be asked. Not in good faith, anyway.

But with powerlifting, the old adage is that you're really only competing with yourself. There's no contact. It's just you, the bar and the weights. Do the job right, you get the three white lights. Do the job really right, you get to take home a trophy or a record. Nobody is getting physically hurt by another competitor. While I can understand the fear of the scenario, where a young powerlifting prodigy in the women's grade is outshone by a trans woman who is simply stronger and nobody can compete with them, as far as I know it hasn't happened. Janae Maree Kroc stopped competitve lifting once she begun hormone therapy to aid her transition, and she's about the only person I can think of who could have fit the 'scenario'.

Jaycee Cooper, from the article, has a decidely unremarkable powerlifting record. And I use the word unremarkable to support her in her ventures. She didn't transition to sneak in a world record. In the 2022 comp, she successfully lifted:

Squat: 150kg

Bench: 97.5kg (failed 102.5kg)

Deadlift: 155kg

She, and everyone else, were eclipsed by Amanda Lawrence. Who, in the same weight class as Jaycee, lifted:

Squat: 242.5kg

Bench: 130kg

Deadlift: 252kg

You have to drop down weight classes to about the 60kg range, before finding people that Jaycee would be on par with in the competition, and even then it's only on bench. That could be a holdover from her body having more testosterone pre-transition? But it's not my business. All I know is that typically, men have noticeably stronger upper bodies. Case in point, I can bench more than Amanda Lawrence. No fucking way I can squat or deadlift more than her, and she's about 10kg lighter than I am.

Sorry that's a lot of waffle, it's something I get asked about at work as these conversations come up, and I've been in that powerlifting community for the better part of a decade. A longwinded way of saying I'm with kb and say "Let them lift". Jaycee was never going to set records, and it was never about that. She just wants to compete and be valid.

You watch motorsport?

Here's a demo of a top fuel fuel injector. There are eight of these.

The goal is to move a "vehicle" from a standing start to a point 1320 feet away in the least amount of time possible. the current record, set November 2022, is 3.66 seconds. It will not surprise you to learn that there are all sorts of peculiar engineering compromises in order to get this "vehicle" a quarter mile down the road. These engineering compromises, however, are nothing compared to the rules compromises. One small example: no electronic clutches. Dumping that much power onto the road is obviously a tricky application of physics and timing but it must be all analog. As a result, much of the innovation in top fuel dragsters is in tricking a bunch of fluid to leak just so such that big rubber tires can launch a spindly little needle down the road without flying apart but also without using, say, a fucking arduino to simplify things.

stupid compromises are the fundamental nature of motorsport. If you look at it, we should all be watching robots with vacuum-powered under-car plenums ripping around tracks doing 6 gees lateral but nobody wants to watch that. Instead we come up with stupid rules about how Michael Schumacher's tire touched the line while he was pitting so that he has to lose a race in order to keep the standings competitive and dumb shit like that. Top fuel? Top fuel without rules is a nitromethane-powered potato gun and a dude in a love sac being rammed down a tube. This was the evolution of the Purdue Mechanical Engineering Competitive Charcoal Lighting Championship - it took about three years before they just dumped LOX on a hibachi to watch the pyrotechnics.

Here's the reductio ad absurdum on powerlifting:

...at which point, any choices this side of that are cultural, the culture says that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, and if they want to be a woman who powerlifts they should lift.

How many times in the past year have you thought even a tiny little bit about powerlifting?

Would you think about it even now if there weren't some transgender angle?

I'm sorry to be the one telling you that competitions are a social construct, not an objective measure of anything. This is why whenever anyone decides they're entitled to more rights, conservatives always jump to sports to tell you why you, a person who has never thought about this particular sport before, should be deeply, thoughtfully, moderately concerned.

I think the bigger story here is that within only two or three years, we've gone from:

Maybe we shouldn't let trans women athletes compete in school sports.

Maybe we shouldn't let children decide to transition their gender.

And, long story short, we have recently arrived at "We must eradicate transgenderism", to raucous applause, at CPAC, a few days ago.

So I think... yeahhhhhh maybe the outrage about women's sports is a little ginned up and weaponized for literal Nazi shit.

Transgender issues in sports is a bible- belt conversation analogous to"'them immigrants is taking my jobs from me conversation. It only exists in the heads.of those people imagining it to be a real concern. I've got better things to spend my time on folks. Piss off and go away shit birds.

oops. I do want to amend this thought t add that thhe genuine issue is that we have waaay too many shitbirds amongst us that want to crap onthe lives of transgender individuals.