Steroids testing should always be standard for all sports with steroid limitations, especially when there is pressure for steroid use by young adults and teenagers for highschool and college sports. These are also things that are monitored medically as standard procedure for just being a child in puberty. It's not data that isn't already being collected so stop acting as if it were.
Second, nothing any more "clunky" about this than a lot of other things you already take for granted in society. I mean look at the fucking weight classes in wrestling and boxing. Surely something as "clunky" as separating a sport into many gradiations on the basis of weight would bankrupt the league, right? Except it doesn't.
I'd imagine at the end of the day, there would probably be some discussion over which was the "better" league, (no limit), vs (natural limit), vs (no exposure).
There is a vast difference between having people stand on a scale before a fight and having people track and monitor results of blood sampling across the course of decades. As one basic example of one basic aspect of it, I quick google search found that a hormone test here in Toronto costs about $270. Now, assuming that price is standard and your league gets a bulk discount so it's only $200 per athlete and parents or schools only need to get the test every couple of years in order to track progress through puberty, what's their motivation to sign up with your league as opposed to a competing league which does not have these additional costs? If they do go with another league and athletes don't enter into getting the mandatory regular hormonal tests until they're older so you only need to worry about these costs with the subset of athletes who've shown that they'll be taking the competitions seriously, how would the results have any value whatsoever (since they would have already matured with perhaps different hormone levels)?
I just don't see how you get from your vague and general idea to actual implementations, particularly at a local level. Could you provide a few more details?
Ah. So apparently you do not understand about normal medical processes surrounding health and human development of adolescents. These tests happen automatically as a child ages, and are performed by doctors.
You are ignoring the fact that *these are matters that every healthy teenager should already being monitored for*, probably once a year or so. It is also something that *every current modern sports team should also be monitoring for, WRT steroid use. And will college and later levels of sports, the money is available and necessary for regular screening, as they are already supposed to test for steroids. Those who are born withoht gonads that make it, but who take testosterone are already going to be taking tests regularly to monitor hormone levels, as are those who take suppressors for testosterone. This is part for the course for trans people. For cis person's, you just have to make sure they aren't using undeclared steroids. Your entire conversation on monitoring costs is a non-starter.
All we have to do is require this testing information that we already have be available to regulators and kept on file to adjudicate qualifications.
Next, since these are restrictions to prevent unfair advantage from being leveraged against those who do not have that advantage. In fact this is the entire basis of the argument for excluding trans athletes in the first place. The two "standard" leagues, in fact, already exist. They just aren't "called" by their hormonal requirements. In the "natural full lifetime testosterone exposure limit" situation, we call that "men's professional sports". And as many have already pointed out, being restricted to a reasonable "maximum" hormone exposure limit doesn't mean that those below those limits or maintaining a more strict limitation are disqualified from participating in normal professional leagues. A person with no testosterone exposure probably wouldn't make the cut for such sports, but that is something to be determined on an individual basis. The only people such a scheme would reject from the "primary" sports field would be people who are taking (or producing) abnormal testosterone levels.
For the "No T at all" group, we have "professional women's sports". I could, in fact, imagine a world where people born with penises might actually want to forego T exposure through medical means, so as to distinguish their abilities and skills without the crutch of testosterone.
Of course, all this would throw a major wrench into the works of many sports clubs since steroid use and abuse is widespread and this would fairly conclusively end the opportunity to do so.
These are generally binary situations, to burst the bubble of various gaslighting in this thread: either you have normal range testosterone through puberty years or you don't. Either you have normal-range testosterone levels as an *adult* or you don't. This creates four categories, with a fifth open to those who have abnormally high testosterone levels, or for those who juice freely and are rejected from core leagues under the steroid requirements that already exist.
It opens up opportunities for 'women' who would like to start taking or competing with steroids and for men who were born without testicles.
It opens up opportunities people who took steroids through highschool, and then quit, or for people who were born with testicles qnd then decided that testosterone wasn't their jam.
It doesn't require any additional testing beyond what is already done, taking on good faith those with the morphology consistent with normal puberty levels and no failed steroid tests would qualify for "primary professional sports". The same goes for "hormonally unassisted professional sports". The only *real* new categories this creates are "testosterone in puberty but not now" and "testosterone now but not in puberty".
As to the medical implications of letting people decide for themselves if and when they use steroids, fuck off with that bullshit. People deserve a right to bodily self-determination.
