The world’s top chess federation has ruled that transgender women cannot compete in its official events for females until an assessment of gender change is made by its officials.
The world’s top chess federation has ruled that transgender women cannot compete in its official events for females until an assessment of gender change is made by its officials.
Didn’t even know there were separate women’s tournaments. Don’t really see the point, honestly, chess isn’t like Greco-Roman wrestling or something where the gender disparity is pretty significant.
But, whatever. On the whole this strikes me as an actually reasonable compromise, so long as they do remain willing to conduct these investigations and reassignments without too much feet-dragging.
They are already getting ready to drag their feet. The other policies announced here aren’t much better. In particular:
There’s no reason for that. What does transitioning have to do with past titles. It all reeks of transphobia.
It’s just a technicality. The gendered leagues don’t need to exist in the first place. But since they do, cleaving to the rules helps maintain the sense of fairness for all the cis folks. Say, if someone was a teen champion, they would no longer be the teen champion once they aged past their teen years. They become a former teen champion.
I agree it’s fundamentally rooted in transphobia, it’s literally a compromise with it. But I find that preferable to an outright ban of even acknowledging transition in the first place.
And yea, we’ll have to see how they handle it. I definitely noticed them opening the door for foot dragging. It’ll ultimately be up to whoever is actually in charge of their investigative wing though. If they actually are fair about it, this could be a step forward.
The gendered leagues exist to promote women in chess. They need to do this because women have historically been discriminated against. These new rules feel like they are asking trans women to prove they are oppressed enough to deserve to play in women’s leagues.
Some of the requirements for the change in status is problematic as well.
That is a hard requirement to meet in large chunks of the world. Many countries don’t legally recognize gender change so it may be quite literally impossible to comply with “national laws and regulations.” There’s some carve out for asylum and refugee status. But it is possible to be a trans woman in a country, not be able to legally change your gender, and not feel unsafe enough to seek asylum.
I’m reading more on the titles now. So from the actual FIDE document:
And from what [FIDE titles]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles) are on Wikipedia. It seems there is an underlying misogyny in how women’s titles work. It seems to me the proper solution is to get rid of the separate title requirements.
So you think we should “maintain a sense of fairness for cis folks” at the expense of creating actual unfairness towards trans and nonbinary folks? Since it’s been shown (cis) women fare better against men when neither knows the other’s sex, wouldn’t it be fairer to simply hide the combatants from one another? Then it would be pure chess.
Okay lib, let’s see how “compromise” works for ya. Easy to say when your cis.
“You need to compromise on your requests for equal treatment and basic human dignity, and if you don’t you’re being the unreasonable one” /s
Amazing and heartbreaking how many people honestly expect trans people to live like that
I don’t really agree here, as a trans women myself I face issues like sexism just as cis women do, and depending on how well a trans women passes she might face additional issues with transphobia. Chess is a sport of strategy and there is no science that somehow suggest AMAB people have more brain power than AFAB people.