World chess federation bars transgender women from competing in women's events | Hacker News Reader

World chess federation bars transgender women from competing in women's events

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1 pointrbanffy15 comments

Chess is one sport where I didn't expect transwomen controversy to even be relevant -- physical abilities don't even come into play.

FIDE has many high-profile events in countries with very conservative views on social issues. My guess is they are under considerable pressure from these stakeholders.

Or maybe they're just trying to do the right thing for women. Perhaps the decision-makers in FIDE have listened to feminist critique of this recent policy movement that advocates for men who call themselves women to be allowed in what would otherwise be women-only spaces.

Why does chess have gender based events? Don’t men and women usually compete together?

Many (most?) events aren't separated by gender, but most games will still be man vs. man. Men outnumber women in chess by almost 6:1. At higher levels, the ratio is more extreme (something like 40:1).

There are women-only competitions to encourage more women to play and to give them some visibility, but it's not the same premise as separated sporting events, that women have an inherent disadvantage.

There was a lot of good discussion about gender in chess a few years ago when Queen's Gambit was released on Netflix[1].

1. https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-the-gender-imbalanc...

In sports where men and women can't compete equally I think separation by sex is appropriate. Is chess such a case? If not then make the tournaments open to all.

I completely agree with you. As noted by others, this is not a question of managing gender equality in competition: chess has no inherent gender advantage. Though there are significant structural biases for men in competition which is why the ratio of women to men in competition is so low.

This is entirely about political, religious, and social pressure attempting to limit social change that they strongly disagree with.

The women's chess division was created by men though. Probably more conservative men than run the organization today.

In a way it's like affirmative action. And like I've said elsewhere, when there's talk of inclusion, someone must be excluded.

Chess is open to all. Women's chess drives inclusion by exclusion.

If chess didn’t have a women’s league nearly all top level chess would be men so a woman’s league is a way to encourage more women to play chess. It’s the same premise as an all female gaming server or gaming tournament

The categories aren’t male and female, the categories are women and “open”, so anyone who wants to can compete in the open category. I’m disappointed they don’t consider trans women women because they are but chess having a women’s league isn’t that weird

> I’m disappointed they don’t consider trans women women because they are

Not really though. There are only two requirements to being a "trans woman":

1. Be a man

2. Call yourself a woman

That's it. Excluding them from women-only spaces is the only sensible policy if the essential character of such spaces is to be maintained.

I’m not going to even really try to argue about this but that’s not really true, you could say trans people at stage X of a transition can play in the women’s bracket

What would be the significant differences at "stage X of transition"?

If your goal is to filter out people pretending to be trans to play in the women’s bracket that would suffice

Also at some point trans people look nearly identical to straight people so no one would even know the difference without scrutinizing records

The goal is to have women-only spaces, in this case a competitive space. It's essential to filter out men for this purpose, including those who pretend to be women.

Making an exception for the latter if they make some attempt to perform femininity, even if it's a somewhat convincing act, really just undermines the entire point.

It's already open to all

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