I agree with you completely about the "privileging" LOL of" lived experience" and personal knowledge generally.** I was just trying to clarify the other issues. In the discussions about "saving women's sports," a lot of the distinctions that are important keep getting lost. Like it's become common to say today that in the US there were no girls & women's sports until Title IX. Which isn't true. Many girls & women who grew up before Title X did tons of sports, but we mostly did them outside of & apart from school. Title IX affected only affected scholastic sports (and other school programs).

Even if every state legislature in the US passed laws prohibiting males from using gender identity claims to participate in female scholastic sports, it would still not settle the matter for all the sports in the US - amateur & professional, youth & adult - that take place outside educational contexts, and whose rules are set by a dizzying array of sports governing bodies such as the NFL, MLB, NBA, Little League, NHL, USTA, USTAFA, PGA, LGPA, USA Swimming, US Ski & Snowboard, USA Surfing, WorldSkate, Amateur Softball Association of the USA, US Croquet Association and so on.

**I would, however, add that having "lived experience" in an area or personal dealings with certain situations sometimes is what prompts people to look into and study up on a particular topic. For example, I've been prompted to research physical differences between the sexes because a couple of genetic diseases that manifest very differently in males & females run in my family, and I only learned about the puberty of infancy coz I have children.

To become an Olympic-class athlete, a person really has to spend years learning in great detail about how human bodies work and what they can do - and in virtually every sport there have always been different performance standards for the two sexes. So the way I see it, being an Olympic athlete actually is relevant, or can be. Which is why the statements in support of female-only sports from Daley Thompson, the UK athlete who won the Olympic gold in the decathlon after Jenner, have also been important and newsworthy. Same goes for the statements about Caster Semenya and other XY DSD athletes in women's sports made by Edwin Moses, the great USA track & field athlete of the 70s & 80s who won golds in the 400m hurdles in 1976 and 1984.

I actually think Jenner's personal insight informed by his "lived experience" here might be valuable. After all, he first became an athletics star in school sports at a time when virtually all school sports opportunities in the USA were for male students only. Moreover, he first made his name in two sports - USA style football, then the decathlon - in which female athletes cannot compete either coz it's too dangerous (football) or the rules specifically say this sport (the 10-event decathlon) is for males-only and no female decathlon is allowed. (After much lobbying, the Olympics finally added a women's 7-event heptathlon in the 1980s; and since 2001 the IAAF has allowed a women's decathlon. However, there is still no women's Olympic decathlon.) As a result of his "lived experience," Jenner has to be aware that if he had declared himself to to be a woman in his youth & expressed his "authentic self" his whole life, he never would have had any chance in hell to become one of the most famous, most heralded athletes of all time.

Also, as a father of six, a stepfather and a grandfather, as well as a man who has been married to three different women - and who has spent 53 years of his life as a man married to female partners, starting at age 23 - I suspect that from his own personal experience, Jenner knows full well deep down that there are lots of differences between girls & women and all the boys & men who wish they were & claim to be the opposite sex. A lot of TIMs who once publicly insisted there was no difference - including public figures like Jan Morris, Renee Richards, Debbie Hayton - later on came out stating that based on more "lived experience," observation and consideration, they changed their minds. Even Joanna Harper, the TRA TIM who trumped up the dodgy "science" to get the IOC to let TIMs into women's sports if they suppress their T for a year, has done an about-face, admitting this year that the claims he made to the IOC in 2015 are not supported by the actual science.