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.
I guess you can look at it from various angles:
At first, I thought it was sexist to separate genders in chess competitions to begin with. Like, it’s not weight lifting or boxing, as
you*others *(oops) said. Why does it matter what I have in my pant(ie)s as I move my pawn to e4?But I imagine female players weren’t as great at the start, considering they didn’t get to compete with the best of the best for years like males could, so it would have been unfair to throw them into a pool of lava to outswim such asbestos sharks as Kasparov. So alright, let them have their own kiddie pool until they grow their own prodigies.
But it’s been decades. Does it really matter what gender they are? If not: stop separating them. If it does, that assumes male and female brains are built different (I doubt that, but I’m in no way an expert, so let’s assume). At least different enough to differ in chess skills. Now, if I’m a dude, I play chess competitively for 20 years and then I go through a surgery, does it change anything at all in terms of chess skills? AFAIK hormone therapy takes some time, so it’s not like I could turn into a dudette overnight. Even if I do, what does it change about my neural structure? So I start in a new female chess competition because I consider myself a female. It’s just me, nobody else out of the 200 contestants, so what does it matter? Now, if the above is true, I start with a noticeable advantage - an advantage over 199 other conestants.
However, I started the whole reasoning process by assuming female and male brains are noticeably different in terms of chess performance. If that is not true, why are there still separate women’s and men’s events?
I’m sure there’s more to it, and I’m just not informed well enough, so the question is honest, and I’m actually curious.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve noticed how similar people are, regardless of gender. Sure, different genders might approach problem-solving differently, but I’ve had great teachers that were both men and women. Some of my best professors have been women.
Maybe they have different gender pools for scholarships or something, but even going back to the original thing…trans people make up a fraction of a percent most likely. I don’t see this really becoming a problem. Spend your energy on making chess more appealing for everyone or something.
I also don’t know much about brain development by gender, though aside from the speed of development (women develop faster than men), I can’t imagine there’s really that much of a difference once everyone hits puberty.
I was thinking the same of the brain stuff, BUT: the ‘fraction of a percent’ argument may get irrelevant (at least in the general sense) quite fast if (and I’m going to exaggerate a lot here) you put a dinosaur in a chicken coop with 9999 other chicken. The dinosaur is just .01% of the population, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Similarly, if instead of chess you take wrestling and let one male heavy weight champion put on a tutu and start in a 100 contestant female competition, he may ram through everyone, regardless of how small fraction of the population he is. But again: speaking specifically about chess, I also find it ridiculous that they barred transgender women from female chess events.