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Even among libertarians, I think that's going to be a pretty fringe position, at least if they're applying the same sort of standards to female athlete reproductive safety and health as is typically done for other types of athletics safety and health. When an athlete is concussed, it is not simply up to them to decide whether they'd like to keep playing. If a male track athlete wants to run through a stress fracture, any decent and well-meaning coach will tell them that they can't do that, for their own health. For anyone who's been near competitive sports, you know that this is part of the overall deal - when you sign up, you pre-commit to doing what you're told by coaches and medical staff, and it's important that you pre-commit to it because everyone in these sports will push themselves too hard and too far if allowed to do so. We should acknowledge that bad choices made by highly competitive people in the spirit of competition aren't the same thing as coolheaded, voluntary choices and that it really is best to delegate this to someone that has the athlete's best interests at heart.
Is there anyone that wants to do a sneaky ban on trans athletes competing with girls? I'd be pretty irritated by a political process that tried to just make it inconvenient rather than openly saying that males should not be allowed to participate in girl's sports.
Openly saying that is easy. Actually instituting a policy that has any chance of being effective is difficult. The most straightforward way would be to simply implement mandatory sports physicals performed by a school doctor that included a genital examination. Of course, that would never happen, as the backlash among normal parents would be greater than any concern about a few trans athletes slipping through. Another way would be to establish a reporting system, where those suspected of being male can be reported to the body governing scholastic athletics, and that body can conduct its own investigation. This eliminates the problem of effectively punishing everyone for the sins of the few, but creates a system that might even be worse—any well-built female athlete could be reported to the commission and forced to undergo a humiliating investigation where her womanhood is called into question and could still possibly end up with a doctor conducting a genital exam. An obvious, straightforward way would be to simply require a copy of a birth certificate with the registration. The only problem here is that Florida has already made it relatively easy to get an amended birth certificate with a different sex, and undoing that system do to concerns about high school athletics would open a whole new can of worms.
Or you can create a bunch of half-assed policies that aren't fundamentally related to the issue but could help catch it indirectly. So if you start asking questions about menstruation you can flag all of the ones that say they've never menstruated; most school sports start at seventh grade and most girls have hit puberty by then and the ones that haven't probably aren't setting any records. But when a 16 year old who has never menstruated wins regionals and is obviously pretty athletic, you have some basis to conduct an investigation that isn't based on rumor and innuendo. I don't think that this is what's going on here, but it's at least a plausible strategy.
Somehow sports bodies are able to determine if a person has a minutely increased levels of some perfomance enchancing drug (some athletes find present such measures a significant obligation), but determining if they posses functioning testicles is to big of an ask.
We're not talking about international governing sports bodies here, we're talking about state and local scholastic sports bodies. It's understood that more is at stake when competing at the highest levels, or even at the collegiate level, than competing at the high school level. There you're talking about athletes who have already shown a significant dedication to their sport and they're more likely to jump through hoops to continue playing. The same can't be said about the girl who wants to run track because all her friends are doing it, or the girl who gets recruited from youth league to play soccer at a small high school that will take practically anybody just so they can field a team.
Anyway, the real question here is for whom is this too big of an ask? If any of these protocols were put into place the biggest objections wouldn't come from disinterested observers like you or me, or even from liberal or trans rights activists. They would be from the parents of the children affected, many of whom are conservative and would otherwise support the transgender athlete ban. Just not when enforcing it subjects their children to invasive examinations.
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