While there is a lot of noise about trans athlete performance, I’m curious about a more practical point : Locker-room. I can’t think about many sport facilities having individual locker-rooms, but usually it’s a room for men, a room for women each with communal shower.
How do you practically manage-it ? How do you get invited/welcomed to your post-transition locker room ? What about the feature left from the assigned-at-birth gender ? What happen when you start developing feature of your transition gender but don’t pass well enough to switch locker-room ?
I may be totally wrong but I wonder whether it’s not more a blocking-point for trans athlete than rules in competition (which impact a minority of athlete anyway) but at the same time we never hear about “sport facilites” opening some “gender non conforming locker-room” for more inclusion.
In Australia, it’s not the same issue it is in the US. Trans rights are protected here, and so, trans folk are legally allowed to use the locker room that is right for them, and on top of that, locker rooms in Australia generally don’t involve people getting naked around each other either to change or to shower. Locker room showers are generally in individual stalls, each with its own small changing area as part of the stall (something like this). That is where the majority of people change. There is a public area with lockers, but people in that space after a shower are mostly either already dressed, or in their underwear.
From my own personal experience, when I was a roller derby player before COVID, it was a non issue. Of course, roller derby is perhaps the most trans inclusive sport on the planet, so I’m not sure it’s a good example. Public swimming pools haven’t been an issue because of the shower design I mentioned above. And as a runner, I don’t really use public change rooms
tl;dr - It’s only an issue because transphobes choose to make it an issue