Someone made a throwaway comment about trans people being banned from competing in sports, which, in the way of social media, acted as a Bat Signal for a transphobe determined to dispute it. They asked how trans people are banned, clearly not prepared to accept anything less than a policy statement from a sports governing body explicitly forbidding participation by trans people.

Because I can't break the habit of arguing with bad-faith transphobes, I responded, citing the Football Association's announcement that trans men who wish to participate in men's football must now sign a declaration that they are "biologically female" and understand the risks of playing alongside "biological males". Trans men who haven't medically transitioned aren't allowed to play, so the only men who would be signing this declaration would not be "biologically female" by many significant metrics. Essentially, the Football Association has made participation conditional on signing a declaration they have good reason to consider untrue, which is a fairly significant barrier.

The transphobe shrugged this off and simply said that of course trans men must be allowed to play with women, because anything else would be unfair exclusion. Rebutting this idea was tricky, because most policy assumes - reasonably enough - that trans people prefer not to advertise their birth assignment to players, officials, and spectators like that, and because a search for "trans men" gets clogged up with transphobes misgendering trans women. But I was able to glean that trans men who have medically transitioned would at best be obliged to discontinue testosterone treatment, with all the dysphoria and health risks that would entail.

Trans men who haven't medically transitioned and who are prepared to publicly misgender themselves could, at least in theory, play women's football. But given the number of cis women and girls who have been accused of being men based on their appearance, I'm not convinced even they would manage it in practice.

Rather than acknowledge that there are in fact significant barriers to participating in football, the transphobe then seized on my loose language of "banned from football" and insisted that trans people are only banned from competing, not from participating. But football is a team sport and most teams are organised around competing. Would teams welcome a potential member who could only train with them and wasn't eligible to play? And even if they did on paper, wouldn't it necessarily separate that member, emotionally and practically, from their teammates?

Perhaps, mused the transphobe, the solution would be trans specific leagues. But the briefest consideration of logistics shows that this solves nothing. A trans specific team would, in order to have enough players, be forced to recruit from a wide geographical area, thereby excluding anyone who wasn't able to travel to a distant venue. They would also have to recruit from all ages, all skill levels, and all stages of transition, thus creating exactly the problems around fairness and safety that proponents of trans exclusion claim to be addressing.

(Incidentally, the suggestion is always for "trans people" to have our own leagues, as if trans men and trans women can compete side by side with no issues. The importance of sex segregation to maintain fairness and dignity apparently only applies to cis people.)

Players joining a trans specific team would also be announcing their trans status to the world. Some people would decline to participate for that reason alone, choosing to prioritise their privacy. And even those who are comfortable being out would have to weigh the risks of being visibly trans in a world that seems at times determined to harm us. A trans league would be a ready-made target for transphobic attacks, from harassment at fixtures to bad-faith legal challenges, because the objective is not simply to prevent trans people having a supposedly unfair advantage in sports but to prevent us having any kind of normal life.

Frustrated with the transphobe's insistence that there is "Nothing to stop trans people playing with each other", I sarcastically put out a call on social media for ten other trans men in my area to form a team. I suggested we could meet at the local leisure centre, where there is nowhere safe for us to shower or change since all the changing rooms are gendered. This, of course, represents another barrier that the transphobe would no doubt wave away, and it's at the heart of why this debate is so important.

It's not just about sport. Sport was the specific subject of the argument today, but the exclusion is happening on many levels at once. Organisations are lining up to announce that unfortunately they are now compelled to exclude trans women because well funded transphobes are threatening to sue. A draft policy implied that trans people shouldn't be allowed to use any gendered facilities - not even those of our birth-assigned sex. It feels as if society at large wants us to disappear: by ceasing to be trans if possible, but by ceasing to exist if necessary.

With that background, being edged out of sports is just one more piece of cruelty. Even if we could somehow form our own league and defend it from attacks, it would be a significantly more complicated endeavour than for a cis person, who could just rock up to an already existing team that suited their skill level. That's discrimination, it's exclusion, and to suggest that there are no barriers because we could theoretically solve it is just insulting.