I’m not all clear on the logic here, but trans women have been banned from chess competitions.
The world’s leading chess federation voted this week to bar transgender women from its women’s competitions.
Federation Internationale des Echecs, or FIDE, acts as the governing body of all international chess competition. In a ruling approved Monday, the organization said that a competitor who changes their gender may gain competitive advantages.
No one has come out to say what those competitive advantages might be. More cc of brain tissue? Should we break out the calipers and ban people with cranial capacities larger than 1500cc? Let’s teach those big headed freaks a lesson.
Fox News is brave enough to say it, though. They consulted super brain scientist Riley Gaines about the matter, because real scientists would just snort and tell them to fuck off. Gaines, whose sole claim to fame is that she tied with a trans woman for 5th place at a swim meet, and made a huge stink about it, was asked whether she agrees with this discrimination. Of course she did. Maybe she can explain the biological reasoning behind it?
No, she can’t. What is that argument about brain size and ability anyway? I need one that wasn’t debunked a hundred years ago.
This society really needs another hard rethink about sex roles . Like there was during the 60s and 70s ( jobs and financial freedoms) or during the 1910s and 1920s . ( the vote)
I think it’s important to emphasise that not only is this ban on trans people in sport stupid and ridiculous – all of them are.
I am sure there are many who would say something along the lines of “well, sure, chess is a brain game, but all the actual sports that involve physical components are fair game”. Those, too, are just as bigoted, misguided and wrong.
From what I heard, the reason behind there being separate events in chess for women was supposed to be that at least at high level competitions men tend to engage in dominance displays that make (or used to make) women uncomfortable. If so, perhaps they are saying that trans women were socialized to behave in such ways. But since they are not explaining themselves that is the most I am willing to try and understand their decision.
@3: Interesting, I thought for a moment separate chess events might have been done because some men seem to lose brain functions when being close to a woman…
Also, if skull size was an advantage in chess I wouldn’t be so bad at the game.
Apparently international chess organisations are dominated by Russians, who presumably aren’t big on trans people.
Is there any actual science, anywhere at all, ever, that proves ANY gender-based or sex-based difference between women’s and men’s ability to play chess? So far I haven’t even heard an anecdote of a transwomen blowing through a women’s chess tournament like a man in a women’s football team.
I can see having separate women’s and men’s tournaments just to a) have twice as many medals to hand out and b) give women a niche in times when men dominated the sport and maybe women would otherwise not have a chance to get in the door in the first place. But if women are now allowed to compete, as they hadn’t been before, and if no one’s actually proven that women can’t play as well as men, then we can still have separate tournament tracks for reason (a) above (or not), and still allow transwomen to compete as women, and transmen to compete as men.
I’d say that this is a very good example of how starting with a false definition will lead you very badly astray.
The false definition that we’ve been working with for a long time in our part of the world is that there are only two kinds of people on this earth: the M’s and the F’s. The notion that there might be other types (e.g., TM’s and TF’s, NB’s, intersex and so on) is anathema to our enemies who simply want to erase us from human society. Lumping everybody into the CM or CF box is the traditional way of erasing transgender people.
This is what FIDE is doing here. They’re comparing the CM brain to the CF brain, and it doesn’t occur to them that that’s a false comparison. If you want to speculate that I myself might have an advantage over cisgender women at chess, you need to compare MY brain, not somebody else’s, to theirs.
I think it’s obvious that my brain isn’t like the CM brain on all points. If it was, I’d be a cis-guy like all the rest. And how exactly does the TF brain differ from the CM brain? How does it work compared to the CM brain? I don’t think anybody has a clue. So how would anybody know whether a TF brain carries a superiority in chess like the CM brain does? And perhaps we might surmise that not all CM brains are identical on every point and neither are TF brains.
In any case, I was always rubbish at chess and no woman worth her salt would ever worry about me. But it doesn’t matter. I get disqualified because transpanic sets in, and you just can’t be too careful about those sneaky transgender people and what they might get up to in this world. Which is why a brainless swimmer is asked for her opinion on this question. If you, like her, dislike transgender people sufficiently, you’ll find her opinion quite comforting.
“You hear the argument about brain size and brain ability and the difference between male and female. But I think that’s missing the point.”
And “the point” is…what, exactly? Has she ever specified?
This sounds like a ruling that is ripe for a legal challenge,
Okay, I read the cited article. First, it’s in something called “Faithwire,” which totally screams doctrinaire-Christian; so we can’t expect any sort of honest discussion of hot-button issues to be allowed there. And second, there’s this quote:
“Change of gender is a change that has a significant impact on a player’s status and future eligibility to tournaments,” [FIDE] said in a statement.
I notice they don’t claim they know of any gender differences between men’s and women’s actual ability to play chess. I’d think they would have found any such differences already, so either way, there’s really no excuse to ban trans people for two more years pretending to look for something they should have long ago either found or confirmed they’d failed to find.
So, what about trans men? Can trans men participate in women’s competitions? Are trans men required to participate in women’s competitions? Because methinks that in all of these actions that prohibit trans women from doing X, Y, or Z, the existence of trans men is deliberately being ignored because trans men invalidate every single argument that transphobes put forward to advocate for the eradication and genocide of all trans people (because yes, at the end of the day, that’s all this is in service to; it only exists to normalize the escalating calls for genocide).
All of this reminds me of that cat show some number of years ago that banned a male calico cat from competing because… reasons, I guess. At some point, we need to do a better job at combating the stupid fucking assumption that biology and genetics are this invioably deterministic. Or, at the very least, we need to stop letting these scientifically-illiterate dipshits control the narrative about these topics.
@11 kome
As far as I know, the FIDE does not sponsor any men’s only tournaments. For example, there is an open “World Chess Championship” and a “Women’s World Chess Championship”. There is no “Men’s World Chess Championship”.
It’s even dumber than you think:
So trans men who won women’s tournaments while they were still women can only hold the titles while they identify as women? There can be no doubt this is deliberately transphobic. They’re actively rewarding players who revert to their original gender identity.
Correct. There’s women’s tournaments and open tournaments, open to allcomers, men, women, trans, etc.
The stupidity of this affair is that women-only events only exist as an effort to popularize competitive chess among women as a counter to the decades of institutional male dominance of the sport at all levels. Transwomen are only ever going to make up a tiny percentage of players in “women-only” tournaments, so there’s absolutely no chance of them derailing that effort, especially since the conservative “men dressing up as women to win trophies” trope isn’t a real thing (except for bigots trying it to “prove a point”).
As a side note, are there any women who follow this blog? I always feel I’m in danger of mansplaining when commenting here about women’s issues — trans or cis.
Yall just don’t understand, us tranfeemoids are so superior to all if you we just shouldn’t be allowed to do anything. Our superiority is a clear indication that we are biologically inferior subhumans that should ge eradicated!
Sarcasm aside the real reason is that we live in a world run mostly by fascists.
tacitus:
Of course.
Grace
Good to know, Grace!
I don’t ever reading that there is even a link between brain mass and being good at chess. Brains aren’t like muscles, ffs.
If I recall correctly there have been a few geniuses examined postmortem and their brains appear more or less average, much to the consternation of biological determinists.
I’m a woman, and a competitive chess player. I live in the Oceania region (as defined by FIDE!) where trans women can and do play in women-only events, and win titles (by which is meant the titles like WIM, woman international master, which are supposed to be for life; not the titles like 2023 NZ Women’s Champion, etc).
The statement that there is a ban on trans women players is not completely accurate. A document has been published by FIDE, which in some parts reads as very positive for trans players – for example, allowing them to appeal directly to FIDE to have the gender assignment on their ID altered – this is very important given that it looks like about half the member countries of FIDE would not allow it or make the change themselves.
The bit that has got a lot of federations and people upset is that FIDE intends to check new applications, and only approve them within a waiting period of 2 years – this would be a major delay for new trans women wanting to compete in international events run by FIDE (for example, the Women’s Olympiad, or the Zonal stages leading up to the Women’s World Championship). For example, say a newly trans woman won a national women’s championship and perhaps the prize included an automatic place in that year’s Women’s Olympiad team – it is possible that the new regulation would ban her from taking up that place.
FIDE seems to be insisting that the delay is only to cover one cycle of the Women’s World Championship, and friends of mine insist that the delay/ban will surely be removed after that. I have doubts, but I am not in a position to know anything for certain!
If you want to ask why the chess world runs Open and separate Women’s events – well, probably best not to ask me, as I feel the whole set-up of ‘women’s chess’ encourages women to aim lower. It is certainly true that women comprise a tiny minority of chess players (maybe 1 in 20) so appear to be weaker, as fewer reach the top levels (notably, GM Judit Polgar reached a position of 8th in the world). One reason for the lack of women may be a toxic atmosphere towards women in the chess world. A long argument, for another day.
In general the attitude of women to threats of ‘men will just say they are women in order to win women’s events’ is ‘bring it on!’
Heligan, that’s quite informative. I took a look for myself.
https://www.chess.com/news/view/fide-publishes-controversial-new-transgender-policy (includes a link to the FIDE policy).
My daughter worked hard in high school to beat the players at an all boys christian school in a multi school tournament.
She became reigning champion after a year and then had had enough and stopped competing.
She is now working hard on integrating her biology, psychology and software engineering degrees into a possible project at the Queensland Brain Institute.
@18 Marcus Ranum — In fact, Einstein himself was asked for permission to do a brain look-see upon his death, to which he replied something to the effect, “Go ahead, but you won’t find anything interesting.” Sure enough, slicing and dicing revealed nothing extraordinary other than a few extra glial cells that nobody has definitively linked to his heightened intelligence.
Why do women have a separate chess tournament, again?
And why are they trying to exclude the trans? Does this have anything to do with playing chess well? Seems to me the only meaningful competitive divide is between humans and machines…
I’m having flashbacks to one of SNL’s old fake commercials.
‘Chess. . .for girls!’
I’m having flashbacks to one of SNL’s old fake commercials.
‘Chess. . .for girls!’
@^ beholder : I’m sure there’s some pretty big divides in the humans category between say Grandmasters and casual players who play once in a while for the fun of it but yeah. Cannot see how being cis or trans or for that matter intersex, non-binary etc… has anything to do with the game at all.
FWIW.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Organized_competition
@21. DanDare :
At chess I presume you mean.. .;-)
Good on her. She wasn’t tempted to go further and make a career of it as a professional chess player? Sounds like she maybe could have if she’d so chosen. Impressive.
@ tacitus :
Wikisurfing from the link in my last comment out of curiousity sicne I’d herd the ‘Grandmaster” term but not known much more about it than that :
Emphasis added.
Fucking hell. So.. being trans rather than cis is as bad as cheating in their minds it seems? Because ..why? It just doesn’t follow. So blatantly, pointlessly transphobic and wrong.
(Okay that’s titles not rank but stil)
Seems to me any theoretical advantage (being = ??? here) would be more than offset by the general social discrimination and cultural barriers against trans people anyhow..
Wonder what they do for Intersex and Non-Binary players?
StevoR, that’s the problem with a quick skim.
Highest formal title is GM, yes. Informal, no.
“”Super grandmaster” is an informal term to refer to the world’s elite players. In the past this would refer to players with an Elo rating of over 2600, but as the average Elo rating of the top players has increased it has typically come to refer to players with an Elo rating of over 2700. Super GMs, the number of whom has grown considerably over the years, have some name recognition in the world of sport and are typically the highest earners in chess.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_(chess))
No-one is saying that titles like GM would be taken away. It’s a specific reference to the separate set of titles that only women can obtain. Women can get the open titles (I’m a CM) and also the w-titles (I’m a WFM) but a trans man would have to give up his w-titles. Some are more-or-less the same as open titles and he could be given such a title instead, even if he hadn’t earned it in the same way – the list is in the document.
The separate w-titles reach down to lower strengths than the open titles, and are meant to encourage girls to play. FIDE more recently introduced open titles (on their online server) which also reach down to weaker players and also appear beside your name in official events. Nobody is suggesting that any open title of any kind would be taken away.
Raging Bee at 8:
I can pretty much guess, based on some Twitter discourse I’ve seen.
It’s not really about biological advantage, in any sport, because the core assumption of transphobes seems to be that trans women are “men” and therefore do not belong in women’s sports regardless.
Trans women might not have a particular advantage in women’s sport X, they might even have a disadvantage. Still, it is to be expected that at least sometimes a trans woman athlete will manage to eke out some kind of professional existence in women’s sport X. According to transphobes, this shouldn’t be allowed to happen on principle, presumably because it takes a spot away from some “real” woman. Or maybe it’s just wrong on some deep philosophical level, because it apparently defeats the purpose of women-exclusive whatever.
Naturally, these people are either neglecting or deliberately refusing to consider why gender segregation in sports exists (inasmuch as it has any actual legitimacy) to begin with.
lumipuna @30:
Probably because most of them only care about women’s sports when they can use it to exclude trans people. I’ve certainly not seen many people who protested against Lea Thomas that also showed any sort of interest in women’s swimming before she got into the news.
But chess has a rating system. Why not just make leagues based on your established rating and then let anyone with the relevant rating play? Why go by gender as an assumed proxy for ability, when we can just go by actual, demonstrated ability?
This is a very muddled comment. First of all, in the context of sports, the correct word to use is regulations. And 2nd, every serious competitive sport has regulations, from weight classes to allowed techniques, and equipment and so on. Depending on the sport, different regulations will be necessary to allow transwomen or transmen to compete. However, in chess there should be only minimal and common sense regulations.
But anyways, FIDE has been a shit organization for a long time anyways. It makes FIFA look good.
From my reading (and this is a vaguely-remembered second-hand report) this move from FIDE is motivated by revenge. There has recently been a group of women complaining about the misogyny rampant in the (men’s) chess world. One of those women is trans (I forgot her name sorry) so FIDE has changed the rules to spite her.
It’s the tremendous weight of the chess pieces. All that extra testosterone and muscular strength acquired by going through male puberty gives men – and trans women – an advantage in making moves faster and being less likely to drop the piece on the wrong square.
s\
@28. John Morales :
Okay, that’sk inda intresting extra info but not sure why it’s an issue for or relevant to anything I wrote?
@32. LykeX :
Exactly! Very good question and makes sense to me hence quoting for truth.
“You hear the argument about brain size and brain ability and the difference between male and female. But I think that’s missing the point.”
Wait a second. Chess isn’t physical and she’s saying that potential differences in mental abilities are NOT the point.
So ok then, please tell is what IS the point of banning trans chess players then? Is it the “icky” factor? If so, grow up. Is it sucking up to Russia and their homophobic views? If so just say so, otherwise, you got no argument at all, literally!
This woman ranted about swim meets and males, females, transgender people, so now she is fully qualified to dictate what chess matches should do about the fact that there is diversity (oooh, I used the ‘D’ word) in those competing? It is chess! It’s intellectual, why would they need to ‘look under the hood’ to see the hardware? I’m sure that when it comes to sex, the xtian terrrorist faithwire knows who should come out on top. (naughty pun intended). Things are all getting so twisted up in these jumbled minds with the big mouths.
The reason that there are more extremely strong male players than equally strong women is simply that more men play chess than women do. It’s simple statistics – chess ability follows an approximately normal distribution and there will be fewer female players at any level of ability just because fewer women play chess.
There will also be fewer extremely bad women players for the same reason.
There are societal disadvantages that IMO cause this relative lack of women players, and the titles for women were meant to encourage more women to play the game. I personally don’t think this was a good idea, but as with so many bad ideas it was started with “good” intentions.
I also don’t think this idea was what caused more women to play the game, but it is a fact that these days the number of women players is a good deal higher, and as a consequence there are now many women who have earned the “open” Grandmaster title and all the lower titles as well.
Judit Polgar was for many years one of the top Grandmasters in the entire world so that, I think, puts paid to the idea of women being naturally weaker at the game than men. For a while there were less than 10 men in the entire world that could beat her at the game. She never took the women’s world championship because she never played in all female competitions. Her significantly weaker Susan did, took that title fairly easily.
I think it’s stupid to deny trans women the right to compete in women’s chess events, of course. Even if the claim that they are “really” men were true that would be utterly irrelevant. There is simply no evidence that a random individual man is any better than a random individual woman, so banning trans women is just a silly and harmful idea based in irrational prejudice.
Friendly reminder that “trans women” > “transwomen” (and “trans men” > “transmen”). With the space in between, it makes it clearer that “trans” is an adjective, and that the person referred to is a woman (or a man, respectively), and that “trans” is a subcategory and not a different category placed in opposition to “woman” used to mean cis woman (or “man” used to mean cis man).
Grace
This isn’t nearly as bad for trans participants as it is in athletics because chess has women’s tournaments and ranks and open tournaments and ranks, not men’s tournaments and ranks, but it’s still outrageous. Misogyny is rampant in the chess world, as Susan Polgar and others have discussed at length: https://twitter.com/SusanPolgar/status/1651588778287308802
It’s a statistical fact that a randomly selected man with a chess rating almost always will have a higher rating than a randomly selected woman with a chess rating, but AFAIWK this is entirely due to cultural factors. Also, as a former tournament player, I will say that for the vast majority of players it’s a colossal waste of time to put in the effort to master the game, and that a higher rating is likely to be the result of having an obsessive personality and a stunted social life.
AFAWK (as far as we know)
BTW, the reason I find this to be outrageous is that rather than being a carefully considered solution motivated by some existing problem this decision is just part of and furthers the anti-trans movement–it’s blatantly political–and it puts FIDE in the absurd position of policing the DNA of women’s tournament entrants (and/or making offensive judgments based on appearance).
…and it puts FIDE in the absurd position of policing the DNA of women’s tournament entrants…
…or the gametes of such entrants…or their genitalia…or whatever other feature(s) they’ve decided “objectively” prove what sex you “really” are (subject to change without notice)…
Which brings us to my next question: have FIDE decided exactly how they would be “verifying” the sex of entrants? I’m sure they would have, if they really want to get it right…right…?
Gaines, whose sole claim to fame is that she tied with a trans woman for 5th place at a swim meet, and made a huge stink about it…
FIFTH?! That’s not exactly proof of transwomen blowing ciswomen out of women’s swimming.
I bet all the swimmers who made first, second, third and fourth places in that meet are laughing and shaking their heads…
@20 reading the article, it’s actually worse than I was expecting, so thanks for the link ;)