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.
Silly question, why does chess, a mental activity, need gendered leagues?
Chess at pro level is brutal. One can get mentally mauled if the adversary has a superior, trained for cruel psychological warfare, mind.
Men just don’t stand a chance.
Have you met chess bros?
I can see why women would want their own league.
The average chess bro is not a trans woman.
The average trans woman chess player was assigned chess bro at birth.
To be clear, the head of FIDE (the chess federation) is close to the Russian fascist state. This is the Russian state showing off anti-trans hate as a culture-war move.
Being a minority in any social setting brings difficulties that others just don’t otherwise face.
Having a women’s category for chess is a way of creating a safe environment for everyone to thrive.
Minorities like trans people? A place where everyone can thrive?
It’s fucking chess. I understand men may have more typical interest, but there shouldn’t be divisions based on sex or gender. Maybe divisions for some neurodivergent people, but I’d bet on many of the great chess players being neurodivergent in some way.
Only counter argument I can give you is have a bit of empathy.
Imagine that you were a young girl and saw this game. Chess. And you wanted to learn how to play.
The first person you asked was your mother and she told you oh that’s a boys game. But you still wanted to learn.
So you decide to just read up on the rules. You don’t really know anyone that plays. So you just kinda play vs yourself and redo. Old GM matches you found in old magazines. None of them are like you btw. They all seem like old men that live on the opposite side of the world.
You really like the game tho. And eventually you realize oh. There are actual clubs/tourneys near here I can go and play with actual people!
You go. And there’s not a single girl there. Because of all the hurdles you had to jump. Most others that would have been interested just quit.
So you get there. You are obviously underprepared because you didn’t have the support system that made learning it easy. Because of that you just get wrecked.
In addition to that you probably will have to hear some dumb jokes. That if you didn’t have such a rough patch to get there in the first place they might have been funny to you. But they aren’t. They just felt like you were being punched down.
Having exclusive tournaments and leagues is a very minor way of rectifying awful historical disparities. It’s not perfect and it’s not a solution by itself. But it’s absolutely needed.
Only counter argument I can give you is have a bit of empathy.
Trans people are people too. If women need protection, trans people need it even more. They’re an even smaller minority that are mistreated even more often. I could write the same made up sad story as you but about a trans person.
If exclusive tournaments are a way to fix historic disparities, women should be kicked out of the league before trans people. I don’t totally disagree with the sentiment, but we can’t have a league for literally every small group we think of. Maybe there should be the main league and the “historically disparaged” league or something, but trans people should not be being removed from this league.
Entirely agree with everything you said. I never implied otherwise.
My entire comment was replying to this:
but there shouldn’t be divisions based on sex or gender.
There absolutely should. Reasoning: in my previous comment above.
If you are going to chess tournaments, you are past the point of getting your ass kicked in chess club. I said it on another thread, but if people are being demeaning and unsportsmanlike, they can get kicked out just as you would any other game. They do it for MTG, YGO and Pokemon TCG tournaments. Bullshittery about trans people aside, this is more of a systemic issue than anything else.
If the gender ratio was something like 1:4 or less, you’d have an argument that everyone should just get along. But there’s like 16 times more men in chess than women and separate tournaments means the gals won’t have to learn chest thumping to deal with the asshole faction they can simply be catty which they already know how to do.
What the fuck is this sexist shit? Women are inharently catty and men are inharently aggressive?
If there’s an issue with men being aggressive, there needs to be rules to prevent it. If the ratio is a problem, there needs to be tools created to address that. The solution isn’t “women are catty and sensitive, so they need to be seperate.”
Erm, no. Both are aggressive. Cattiness is aggression.
Ok, why did you say men do chest thumping and women are catty?
Because the sexes tend to display aggression, status competition etc. in different ways. Are there catty men and chest-thumping women sure but bimodal distribution. Just like e.g. height.
I’m not going to argue with it being correct because it doesn’t matter. If the issue is aggression then it’s aggression, so just say aggression. Catty is also an insulting term. The league should have sportsmanship requirements and it shouldn’t matter how your aggression is presented or what gender you are when you are aggressive.
My apologies. I still don’t understand. Are you suggesting that women are too fragile to deal with men’s posturing, or what? It’s fucking chess. Unless someone is arguing there are blatant skill discrepancies between men an women, it still doesn’t makes sense why there are divided tournaments. Is the argument women are less strategically minded, or what?
TIL: Chess had separate things for genders.
Weird…
They don’t want the chess geeks to jizz their pants. /s
Ugh, why do they feel the need to even write these rules in the first place? I can almost guarantee you there’s like, five trans people who are even registered to play chess. Why go to so much effort to block such a fraction of a percent of people anyways?
Whenever I read articles like these, I substitute “trans” for a different minority, such as a racial or ethnic minority, and it really puts it in perspective.
I remember when Utah made a huge deal about it in women’s sports. And someone like the Utah governor was against it, saying he’d never seen so much hate around something so little. He told his colleagues that in the entire state, only four trans youth were even playing registered sports, and most were JV, not even going to competitions. It’s sad to see people so stoked by hate for something so…mundane. :/
Because the point is to eschew hatred towards people who are different. Since they can’t have a “no black people” rule anymore, they target another vulnerable minority community.
Removed by mod
Only if your metrics are completely broken. This is just plain old fashioned transphobia and culture war copium - nothing straight about it.
And they also made it so trans men have to give up any women’s titles they’ve earned. So, they simultaneously think trans men are men, but trans women are not women.
If anything, based on the past comments of the head of the organization, they have a position that’s generally “women are dumber than men and we want to make decisions that align with that ethos always”.
I’ve stopped being surprised by chess dorks after it came out that America’s Champion, Bobby Fischer, our Hope Against The Commie Gameplaying Menace was literally a neo-Nazi and not subtle about it.
America supporting fascists, because they are anti-communist, has looooong history.
Fascists 🤝 Capitalists
At least for the first stage of the tumour.
And the terminal stage.
It might have evolved, but Mussolini’s fascists initially made their money being hired thugs for the wealthy and industrialists who wanted to directly attack and scupper organising workers.
Similar in Nazi Germany with the Brownshirts iirc.
I guess under Neoliberalism you can kind of just skip the street gangs and use cops to attack unionists, so it’s a different set of material conditions these days but the patterns are there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer
Holy crap that was a wild read. Jewish Mother but a Holocaust denier. Died in exile in Iceland while evading criminal deportation to the US. I had this vague memory that he was an asshole but I had no idea.
I’m more partial to Kasparov myself.
Wait, there’s women’s chess?
