The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.
The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.
It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.
That’s true for grouping by gender as well, probably even more so. Genetic lottery means some will always be better at a given sport than others of the same gender putting in the same effort. But it’s so engrained in our thinking that we don’t even perceive it as a problem, we just tell those with physical disadvantage that a certain sport is not for them.
So we are far from competing with perfect here, and being able to pick other attributes to group by should enable us create much more evenly matched groups. I mean, right now we just use one deciding factor for everything and call it a day. And that’s before we get into the whole gender discussion.
Regarding the actual formulas, I think we just need to find good tradeoffs between fairness and practicality. Of course even a perfectly fair system will fail if it doesn’t work in practice, but I think we can do much better than just using gender in pretty much all cases.