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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.
Ooh, that’s clever. They ducked out of having to set their own criteria.
That definitely changes things somewhat. I was assuming the investigation would involve your doctor providing testimony, not whatever hoops your local jurisdiction may or may not have in place.
I suppose women’s leagues had more value in the past than they do now, I don’t see any problems with just getting rid of them at this point. But this could just be my western perspective speaking. They might still have great value in other parts of the world.
It now sounds like they just ducked the issue though, for the most part. Not setting their own criteria or using the criteria of an international medical association was a little underhanded. Just because the local laws vary from place to place shouldn’t mean trans folks from some places can’t win chess tournaments anymore.
Honestly that surprises me a lot less though. Chess is unusually popular with intellectual-leaning bigots for some reason, it’s a bit of a refuge for racism sometimes. Makes me really glad Magnus is the top player these days, he’s a bit more of a modern guy.
I think women’s leagues have their place still. Or some kind of system to encourage more women into chess. There’s currently 15.7k men with titles and only 4k women with titles. Until those numbers get closer I would want to see some kind of action taken.
If you want to get radical with women’s league you can just have the requirement for them to declare that you are a woman. It can quite literally be a checkbox on a forum when registering. Social pressure will take care of most of the issues. The edge case of men regesterioin bad faith can be handled on a case by case basis.
We really do need some better way to catch cis folks mis-registering in bad faith. It’d resolve some issues around the whole broader battle.
We could just do blood tests. Check for a wider variety of steroids in professional sports while we’re at it. Then, your hormone levels would classify you, not anything you could say or choose.
Invasive as all hell though.
No we don’t and no it wouldn’t, bigots are just going to come up with the next excuse for their bigotry while we’re subjecting innocent people to things that are (as you aptly put it) invasive as all hell
Yeah, but otherwise they’re just going to keep shutting it down with accusations of cheating. You can’t just hand wave that away, it won’t go away. It needs to be dealt with systematically, eventually.
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
Some people want the whole world. Others just want to see improvement.
I’m just saying if your compromise involves throwing a minority under the bus, your just a speedbump on the road to fascism.
Eh. Just because some compromise is bad does not mean all compromises are bad. Every situation is unique, and it’s not like compromise is murder or something.
Democracy outranks human rights. The human rights were put there in the first place by the democracy, and can be amended by it as well. It completely outranks them, unless you believe they are “god-given” or something.
This is why compromise within your own political system, in certain cases, retains value. If your faction is not strong enough, as trans folks in international chess probably aren’t, then it’s a tacit acknowledgement of your right to exist.
Assuming the previous position was an outright ban, anyway. I don’t actually know if it was or not.
Just have to chime in here.
Human rights are fundamental and intrinsic. They can’t be “outranked.”
Legislating for them and enforcing them is due to institutions such as governments (and in an international context the ICC if, say, the government has become genocidal).
Right. Which is why they’re doing the uyghurs so much good right now. Those intrinsic rights sure are protecting them.
Point being, they’re only intrinsic because we say so.
I don’t recall any part of the bill of rights saying “this doesn’t apply in cases where it’s unpopular”
The whole thing was put there via voting. It’s the first ten amendments to the constitution.
It’s the law of the land. Democracy does not mean you can ignore laws you disagree with.
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.