I can empathize with the desire to keep private spaces private and sports competitive and fair. But I sincerely believe that any proposed rulemaking in the direction this petition is requesting would cause considerable harm and would likely fail to deliver on its stated goals.

Enforcing the proposed rule would require extensively invading the privacy of everyone to police who is or isn’t in the “right” place. It encourages people to judge others based on how they look, not who they are, and encourages harm to anybody who doesn’t appear to conform to the viewer’s highly subjective opinions. It would especially enable additional racial discrimination, either by giving malicious actors an excuse to hide behind & conduct some truly humiliating harassment, or just from honest mistakes because a particular hereditary background might distribute fat or muscles in a very slightly different pattern than the viewer’s own.

I think it’s important to remember that many sports, especially children’s sports (pre-high school), aren’t particularly intended to be competitive in nature. Teenagers are particularly diverse in their appearances and rates of development. Bad actors could more readily prey on children by claiming to need to check the child’s sex than to try to gain access by pretending to be “trans”.

I can’t pretend to know what the “right” answers to the kind of concerns being raised in the petition, but I sincerely believe that what is being proposed here would be a disastrous way to try and address those concerns.