The international chess federation known as FIDE has published new rules that state that a person whose “gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made”.
The new rules introduce the following changes:
- Trans women cannot participate in the women’s category unless they are explicitly allowed in a case-by-case process that can take up to two years.
- Trans men will be stripped of their titles achieved before their transition while trans women will retain their titles achieved before their transition.
- In case a trans person is allowed to participate, their trans condition will be added to their files and communicated to events organizers.
The gender division is because women on average are worse than men at chess and likely to be eliminated in a tournament early on if they manage to qualify at all.
This is because chess is a boys club where men and boys get better training and have an easier time advancing and practicing then women.
The best way to get better at chess however are tournaments, where you can play your equal under a stressful and emotional context. Since women can’t advance as well as men because of discrimination, they wouldnt be able to play tournaments making it even more difficult to advance their game.
The women’s league are created so that women can play in tournaments, get practice, get better and be able to play in the big boy tournaments as well as a creating an environment where sexual harrasment, which is also a problem at the main tournaments, is mitigated.
Edit TL;DR women’s league are there because women chess players typically get sidelined. Its basically affirmative action.
So a protected category for women only, because of social factors rather than inherent physical differences.
This makes some sense to me based on my own experiences in other areas like mathematics and science competitions. The boys in my school who knew me were mostly alright but it was still a very strange environment to be a teenage girl in. I was always keenly aware of being an outsider. And it was so much worse in rooms full of strangers at competitions. Intimidating and overwhelming.
For all that I was consistently at or near the top in our school, I always fell at the outside competitions. Felt horrible too, that I was letting everyone down. I was too young to understand the sexism at play so I just beat myself up about it and stopped participating.
In general, I support protected categories for women. We haven’t come anywhere near far enough in reducing sexism to make them unnecessary. I don’t know if it’s a big enough issue with trans women in competitive chess to make this sort of ruling. It might have the balance wrong. But it would be good if there was more understanding of what these kinds of environments can be like for cis girls and women.
Right, so the transphobic fear the FIDE has is that men might try to exploit a loophole by “posing” as trans. So they have these severe restrictions on who might be considered transitioned, why they will “alert” tournaments that someone is trans, why they require legal proof of transitioning before giving in and why they’re stripping trans men of their titles (so that if a cis man manages circumvent all these protection by successfully posing as a trans woman and having won all these titles transitions back, he no longer has them).
It’s the same trans-panic as in so many other sport federations. Severe legislation hurting trans people trying to pre-empt a completely made up cheating scenario.
edit: (hopefully) clarified the wording
Uuh… What are you saying? A trans man posing as a trans woman? What.
If you mean a cis man posing as a trans woman and then “detransitioning”, what do trans men have to do with it?
Sorry that got confusing, I’m referring to this section:
I think the scenario they are trying to prevent here is a cis man posing as a trans woman getting access to the easier womens titles, gaining titles like Womens Grandmaster, and then “detransitioning”. Now they are in possession of a Grandmaster title they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s not the Grandmaster title but still. So to prevent that they’re now a FIDE master.
The solution to this completely made up problem ends up of course stripping trans men of their “Womens …” title to a lower title.
If trans mens’ titles are converted to general titles of equal level (which the policy does allow for - it does say “same or lower level”), it would actually be a really good policy, as it would prevent trans men being outed by having “Womens…” titles. But given the rest of the changes are blatantly transphobic, it doesn’t seem that respecting the privacy of trans men was the goal.
Yes the policy “allows” for that, but the decision solely lies with FIDE. And the examples they give are of deranking. What they mean by that is not Changing Womens Grandmaster into a general Grandmaster. The requirements for a GM are higher. You need 2500 ELO and perform three “norms” of 2600 performance rating. Essentially have high ELO and show against other GMs your skill. For a WGM you need an ELO of 2300 and three “norms” of 2400 performance rating.
Since a WGM doesn’t meet the GM requirements (otherwise they would be a GM) they can’t get that title. But now they’re stripped of their WGM title as well and placed in rank of FIDE master, which requires “only” an ELO of 2300, and no norms. As such it is lower than WGM.
A player at that level is already well connected and known in the community. They wouldn’t be able to keep their transition secret, what with the rumour mill going around. Plus the decision of whether they want to “derank”, giving up their earned title for a lower but more gender-affirming one, should ultimately lie with the person and not with the body that already bestowed that title on them.
It seems like the issue is that the Womens and Open titles aren’t directly equivalent in terms of their requirements, then? Since it would be unfair to give a higher title when the person hasn’t earned it, and there’s no title with the same requirements, then the nearest equivalent title would seem the only option.
I also suspect that the likelihood of someone being trans and having an extremely high title is quite low, and for the majority of trans chess players, the transfer would be between lower ranked titles, and when they are not as well-known, which means it would be both more viable and more important for their privacy to be respected. That said, I do agree with you that it should be down to the trans person to choose what they want to happen with the titles they’ve earned. I just thought it was worth pointing out that transferring trans men’s Womens titles to the nearest equivalent Open title is a good policy, even if it was implemented unintentionally.
Did you not read what I wrote? Was this reply meant for someone else?
Yeah I thought you were the person I had initially replied to, and was expanding on my initial thought trying to clarify that while having a womens category is not discrimination, this regulation is discriminatory.
That makes sense, but… isn’t the “International Chess Federation”, the actual big boy tournament?
No it’s the federation which hosts many tournaments amongst them the “big boy tournament”, the World Chess Championship, and parallel to that the Womens World Chess Championship.