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International Chess Federation (FIDE) to ban and punish transgender players
(www.erininthemorning.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Why are men and women separated in chess competition at all? There is no logical reason other than sexism and transphobia. The reason the top women in the world are so far below the top men is because chess has historically been a man's game and the history of and continued sexism has no doubt kept out women who could be just as good as the best men. I play chess regularly online and have lost to both men and women. I wouldn't be surprised if several top chess players chose to leave fide in favor of other competitions over this.
I'm a chess fan. Men-only events were abolished in the 1980s. There are now women's events (no men allowed) and open events (everyone allowed). In practice open events are 90% male, and the male players, especially at the lower levels, tend to fit the smelly and socially inept stereotype. Playing in them can be unpleasant for women, and women's events exist basically to provide playing venues where women can enjoy competitive chess while staying the hell away from us clueless males. As a clueless male myself, I can get behind that, no problem. I understand and I'm fine with it. How do cis women feel about playing alongside trans women? Idk, I'm cis male and I don't feel entitled to spout off about that. But I think they are the ones I'd want to listen to the most.
The top levels from what I can tell aren't as bad as the lower levels, since the effort it takes to reach that level of chess tends to weed out the clueless and lazy. There is still bad stuff though, e.g. the incidents with GM Alejandro Ramirez.
You might like the book Chess Bi tch (that is the title, damn censor bot),by WGM Jennifer Shahade reviewed here , about her experiences in both women's and open chess events coming up through the ranks.
As for FIDE, there currently aren't really alternatives at the top levels. FIDE on the other hand is not much of a factor in lower and mid level chess. Those events tend to be regulated by national and ad hoc federations, etc.
Does what cis women think about playing trans women really matter? You wouldn't give a racist a time of day for saying they don't want to play a black person, why should we care what TERFs think?
Because it’s a restricted participation class, and like it or not the details of those restrictions are important to the participants.
If the class exists because women want it, then it’s reasonable ask women participants what they want.
If someone proposed a restricted class limited to PoC, it would be entirely appropriate to ask PoC what they think about the proposal.
Nah, I don't buy it. The assumption with this line of thinking is that trans women don't inherently belong to that class of participation. The majority of a group (cis women) do not get to unilaterally decide who is/is not a part of the greater group (women).
But following this analogy through, you're not asking all PoC. You're asking the majority of the subset (for example, black participants) whether a minority of the subset (for example, Asian participants) should be allowed to participate or not.
In this case, the organizers of these tournaments are picking and choosing their own definitions for who qualify as "women" and listening only to those opinions. The decision is already made, and pointing to the remainder to justify the decision is working backwards from that conclusion.
I don't think it's right to call it "an assumption". By definition, a restricted competition class uses rules to establish who is allowed to participate. These rules are willfully and intentionally composed. When circumstances arise that make the rules ambiguous in some way, the participating community is called to clarify them.
This isn't unique to women's chess, it applies to any restricted class sport or competition.
To be clear, I am not in any sense telling the chess world, much less women players, how to set the rules for their restricted class of competition. I am saying that women chess players are stakeholders in the rules of women's chess. Precisely how their input is to be converted into a decision is not in my scope of understanding, and it would be presumptuous of me to hazard a guess at how they prefer to operate women's chess.
Agreed, and that was not my intent.
I genuinely don't how or if women chess players were involved in this decision, I'm only responding to the assertion that asking "what cis women think about playing trans women" is morally equivalent to asking racists whether they want to play against black people. It paints current women players with a broad brush and disenfranchises them from the management of their own competition.
But I think this part is where the disconnect is happening. Before this decision, cis women and trans women were both components of women's chess. The act of conferring with only a subset of that group implies that the other does not fall into that category. Relying only on the majority group's opinion on the status of the minority group is itself an assumption that one of the groups inherently belongs less than the other.
Cis women are stakeholders, I didn't mean to imply that they are the only stakeholders That may be lack of clarity on my part. I definitely did not mean to suggest that ONLY cis women's opinions matter, or should be considered in rulemaking.
I offered that as a counterpoint to the assertion that the opinion of cis women is morally equivalent to the opinion of racists.
Again, I don't really know how or if women chess players (cis or trans) were solicited for their opinions on these rule changes.
You're looking at my analogy the wrong way. I'm saying that if a racist said they didn't want to play with black people as they don't see them as equal, we wouldn't give them the time of day, so why do we give bigoted women the time of day because they refuse to accept transwomens gender?
If the larger community proposed a restricted class for black people, we would still listen to black people about whether they thought it was a good idea, not the racists.
The previous commenters' statement that we need to listen to the women in the women's restricted participation class, with respect to rule changes for the women's restricted class, is valid. I think you've jumped to a conclusion that women chess players would oppose including trans chess players, without a basis in fact. It's not clear to me that proposed restrictions on trans participation are actually coming from women participants.
But if women players are concerned about the effect of including trans players (whatever effect that may be), clearly we should listen to them. The limited participation women's class exists to serve the needs of the women in that class.
It's more like a tiny minority of cis women think all trans people should be shot at dawn and they get all the press, and are the only ones permitted to be acknowledged as "true women" with rights and shit—ironically.
source, am woman who really doesn't care where people piss and shit and thinks we can't get evidence on whether trans people have advantages in sport or not unless we let them, y'know, do sport
I think similarly. If, as a previous commenter implied, the main concern is discomfort related to social mixing between men and women participants, then the vast majority of female chess players are probably fine with including transwomen. But it's their restricted class and they should be full stakeholders in any decisions.
I think every sport has its own challenges regarding trans/intersex participation in restricted women's classes, and it's certainly not my role to tell women participating in those classes that they should accept participants with male genetics. I'm 100% behind social acceptance of trans identity, but athletic contests add a dimension that I am in no way qualified to comment on.
Great comment, very insightful.
Also, censor bot? Where is there a censor bot?
I griped about the censor bot here: https://lemmy.ml/post/3449468
Since men have been getting support and funding for over a century in sports and games like this, you end up with them dominating the field. Women's categories bring in more female players that otherwise wouldn't have a chance if the entire game was open only. But on the other hand, this enables concern-trolling over "transgender invasion". It's also applied questionably to sports that maybe don't need this such as in the case of Zhang Shan & Olympic skeet shooting. It can reinforce gender stereotypes. Finally, I'd say it's frustratingly slow at leveling the playing field.
I'll assume you just didn't understand what I meant so I will repeat it. Men and women can both play chess. Male brains are not superior to female brains. The reason there are more male pros in chess is because of the centuries long head start they had. To rectify this, there must be a conscious effort to boost female chess players. The current strategy to do this is to create a women's league. At this rate, perhaps by 2100 there will be an equal mix of male and female pros, and we can abolish the gendered division in chess because it would no longer serve any purpose.
Having the current best female chess player, Hou Yifan, be at rank 55 and be the third woman ever to be in the top 100, while the second best woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, is at rank 347, doesn't exactly paint a very gender-balanced playing field.
I think the point is that the field should be left alone. Let players of both genders rank wherever they do. Seems odd to separate the genders for a non-physical sport.
In a way they are as there is no "men only" tournaments. There is open for all, and a few women only. You just won't see any women in the open for all tournaments as they fail to qualify so ending the womens tournaments would just result in having no female competitors at all.
They do that, in the men's division. The men's division is open. Anyone can participate.
There are 16 times as many male chess players than women so men dominate the open category by sheer number alone, it's basic statistics.
As such the woman's category is not so much a separate thing but a subset of the open one and if nothing else it provides visibility and a competitive field where women can deal with female instead of male asshole competitors so they can comfortably be catty queen bees instead of learning how to chest thumb.
Do you think that activities that are dominated by a certain gender are that way "naturally", or would you maybe agree that societal factors and sexism play a role too? The idea of "just leave things alone and let people do what they want" often ignores the subtle way that men and women are encouraged towards or discouraged away from those activities.
Then you will get all the top tournaments with maybe a few women, none of them will likely win (based on current ranking), which will cause possibly even less women to try chess and reinforce the vicious circle (less win also equals less money, less sponsors). Basically, after that you will get protests as well.