The World Chess Foundation has ruled that transgender women cannot compete in its competitions for women. The decision by FIDE, the Switzerland-based federation, is perplexing and disturbing. FIDE is setting a two-year period for review. Frankly, I do not understand why there are male and female competitions in chess where relative strength is not an issue. Yet, even assuming that there is some reason to have separate competitions, the ban on transgender women seems entirely gratuitous and wrong.
FIDE said ”[t]wo years is a scope of sight that seemed reasonable for the thorough analyses of such developments. It is to set a certain deadline for a new reiteration of these policies, without rushing it.” In the interim, ”[i]n the event that the 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.”
There was recently a bizarre case involving a man who wore a burka to compete in the women’s competition in Kenya.
The common rationale for separate competitions is marketing and development:
“[S]eparate tournaments for girls and women don’t mean that girls and women are more or less capable than boys and men at chess. However, there may be less interest in chess among girls and women compared to boys and men. Based on 2019 statistics, 14.6% of US Chess members are female, and that is a new, record-high percentage. Thus logically, and in reality, a smaller base of females means fewer women than men at the top of the chess rating list, as one study found. Offering occasional female-only tournaments may make chess more attractive to girls and women, for the financial, social, and publicity reasons mentioned above.”
Yet, since chess is an intellectual contest, it is hard to see why gender should have any role in competitions. Even though there are fewer female chess players, there are still many who can compete at the highest level. There are thousands of women competing and capable of succeeding on the highest levels. Those women can be used as role models and promoted by the federation. That would seem preferable to a segregation of players by gender.
Even if one accepts the marketing and development rationale, it is hard to imagine why transgender women should be barred from women’s competitions on that basis.
It might seem the WCF is tired of the transgender BS and just want to make an interim position that reflects member viewpoint and to see how the whole thing shakes out over time. I, for one, am tired of the struggle to force approval of a third or fourth synthetic sex on the world. Chicks with “special equipment” and special charms, or ugly men trying to be women is fine with me if it’s fine for them. But don’t ram it down our throats as special folks with special rights. And my opinion is women playing chess with men is wonderful, especially when they win.
Marie Curie won the Nobel prize but she had to modify her DNA.
“Even if one accepts the marketing and development rationale, it is hard to imagine why transgender women should be barred from women’s competitions on that basis.”
Chess tournaments are open to anyone. There are some tournaments have a category for female players. It is hard for me to imagine how the development rationale is not relevant. One only need look at FIDE rankings, or the ratio of female to male players, to see the value of development and encouragement of women chess players. One would think that if equality is what Transgender individuals were actually seeking they would prefer to compete in the open category. Perhaps equality matters less to someone not entering the open tournaments than making a statement about their gender is.
“Yet, even assuming that there is some reason to have separate competitions, the ban on transgender women seems entirely gratuitous and wrong.”
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But there are no “transgender women” only men and women – a biological fact we’ve known for eons. Anything else is the figment of someone’s imagination. Delusionists aren’t a protected class; neither are those who “want it really, really bad.”
Seems pretty obvious why you can’t have a mentally challenged trans play chess, they would keep thinking the king is a queen and a queen is a king.
Jim22:
Okay, that wins the internet.
LOL:)
That was great Jim22.
Jim22, et al;
A guy goes to a doctor, has scans done & comes back for the consultation. The doc puts up one image after the next. After each image is put up the patient describes what he saw in the most filthy & disgusting manner. Somewhere in the middle of the image descriptions the doc questions the patient what’s going on with all the filthy thoughts.
The patient tells the doc: Filthy thoughts? It’s You that keeps showing me all the filthy images! LOL;)
😁 Checkmate! Well done Jim22!
Chess, more than most games, measures IQ — or at least that portion of IQ which can focus the imagination and ‘see’ how games might play out.
Google “image male female iq” to find a chart. Men outnumber women in the extremes. More men than women score below 70. More men than women score above 140.
The women’s division in other “mental” sports is also found in bridge and backgammon and poker.
(Ex proctor in Mensa administering the tests.)
A transsexual female chess player showed up at a women’s final and inquired, “Where are the women’s change room?”
The tradition of “Women’s Chess” has its origin largely in the fact that male dominated chess was often, let’s call it, uncomfortable for women. In the distant past, even the recent past, very few women played tournament chess but I’m one of them. I had many great experiences playing against men, got many lunch invitations, and made many friends. I also experienced a very special contempt that some men feel when losing a game to a woman.
For example, one night I was playing an eastern European man whose position was totally lost (clearly he should have resigned) but his young son giggled about his dad’s position and the man became hostile toward me until the man’s friend came to our table to tell him, “Yuri, be gentleman.” It’s just one example but a real example. Most American men are fine with my attacking style of chess, but when a man is hostile on the other side of the chess board it can be frightening; consider how much anger a person can evoke with their facial expressions and body movements. In the past, those kinds of situations must have led women to the comradery of women’s chess.
Women’s chess is a tradition for women and it’s part of chess history. I don’t believe that someone who declares themselves to be a woman (no hormones, no surgery) is qualified, perhaps those who’ve been on female hormones for years and had the gender reassignment surgery are but either way, the tradition women’s chess is still an important factor. Today, most strong women players don’t even want the “Women’s” title because it implies an inferior ability, even though some still enjoy the interaction of women’s tournaments. In another era in the future there probably won’t even be “women’s chess”.
This is silly.
The reason for separation by sex/gender in athletic competitions is because of the relative strength issue. Or at least, that is what they said for decades. Now, with chess, we are witnessing a case where the reason for separation is because of…I’m not sure.
Regarding the quantity of participants at the top: The idea seems to be that attracting more females is dependent upon the marketability of the current crop of female chess players. The organization responsible for this seems to think so. It seems silly to me, but I can’t determine the sanity of a bunch of pinheads leading an international organization. Do those people earn their scale within the organization based upon the number of stupid ideas they create yearly? Or is this a lot of DEI stuff?
“Now, with chess, we are witnessing a case where the reason for separation is because of…I’m not sure.”
Please read the post by mhj above and consider yourself educated.
And if that doesnt do it, can i have my knight identify as a queen? Pretty sure i could be world champion if so.
While I have real problems with physical sports and transgender participants in those sport withs trans women competing against real women, I think the chess federation is off base here. I have heard all the arguments about men and women’s brains and how they think. Mostly it’s statistical and simply because few women have been in a sport whose high levels were closed to them. Women can participate and win and do well. They simply have little incentive to compete in what remains almost a male dominated sport, and very exclusive. Practicing in medicine I heard that women are simply good for primary care like ob-gyn and pediatrics, family medicine and internal medicine but not surgery, or neurosurgery, interventional radiology and on and on. Well guess what fellows they’re exceptional in those areas and plenty more. It’s all about skill, mind and opportunity. If it’s all men making the decisions and doing the accepting, well then they will seldom get the chance to excel but can do so when the have an equivalent expectation.
I was in advanced placement classes from the 7th grade on and they were dominated by the ladies but it all seemed to stop once we hit college, wonder why. When I started at Emory University in 1966 the freshman class was 375 men and 225 women and never a question raised about it. It took some years for that to disappear but there are still some Neanderthals in our men’s ranks about the place of women in the higher disciplines.
I guess you might want to talk with my daughter who has a masters in aerospace engineering and thinks of supercomputers as playful objects and who wrote a treatise with a formula that predicted all the fuel, provisions and atmosphere necessary for any type of Mars expedition whether slow approach or rapid. Tell her she does not know math, physics or orbital mechanics. All her education was at Purdue University and they know a little about space exploration and the 1st and last men on the moon.
“the ban on transgender women seems entirely gratuitous and wrong.” Maybe to the Professor, but not to real women! Those who have lived their lives as women, who have experienced all that encompasses, for good and for bad, are not going to accept some guy who dresses up like a female as one of their own. Either you have a gender-free competition, or you have separate ones based on the contestants’ actual DNA. If trans-women are accepted into the women’s category, then real women will drop out and the category will be meaningless.
Geb
I respect your thoughts on this and i dont even necessarily disagree. But it seems to me the chess federation is making a practical decision. Men allowed to compete in the womens division would not only defeat the purpose, it would for sure open the door for dominance of that division by “penis bearing persons”. The numbers dont lie. What is to gain by allowing this, other than virtue signaling?
More men grow up playing chess than women and do so at an earlier age. The more one plays, the better they get, so it is understandable for men to lead in the tournaments.
The chess federation needs to choose either one tournament for all or one for women and men without all the confusion. A champion male entering the woman’s competition as a ‘woman’ satisfies his need for winning but destroys the hopes of an entire gender. The woman’s tournament opens the world of chess to women so that future competitions can have men and women competing together at the same level.
For terms to mean anything there must be boundaries around them. A male human has a meaning that excludes a female.
Title 9 has a separation that requires a balance of scholarships, emphasis, and entry. To remove female from the usual boundary means that a fake female can win scholarships and remove a real woman from the sport.
That is theft by fraud. Scholarships are valuable and rare. A woman of less that 6 feet may get a scholarship but men of the same size will beat a woman 99% of the time.
Chess is voting to keep an important boundary in place. It may be partially symbolic but symbols are important.
It seems chess masters are more logical than lawyers. Checkmate Jonathan.
Congratulations to The World Chess Foundation for throwing the b******t flag on the whole transgender civil rights issue.
First let me state that I am against mutilating children and also against men competing in women’s sports.
But, what I find interesting is hearing women complain about it. One, if women would take a stand and boycott together, they could take care of this. Two, and this is the big one to me, women got what they wanted. Women have for decades celebrated tearing down “boys clubs” like BOYS Scouts, little league, hockey or any other male sport. How many times have we heard how wonderful it is for the girl fighting to play on an all boys team? I’ve never heard a single woman complain and say, that is so unfair, she is taking a position away from a boy. So now we have mentally challenged loser males entering female sports and activities. Enjoy what you created ladies.
What do all four of these scenarios have in common?
A girl competes and beats a boy – “Isn’t that wonderful?”
A girl competes and loses to a boy – “Well that was expected but what an effort by her”
A boy competes and beats a girl – “What a bully, he should stay in his space with other boys”
A boy competes and loses to a girl – “He couldn’t even compete against girls, what a joke!”
Ah, maybe they are going by basic biology not body ‘redesign’ or ‘enhancement’? Given today’s world you could potentially have a transgender female winner and a year later that person decides that being a woman was not what the person really wanted and reverts back to being a male. What gender did they really win as? Maybe I am over thinking it.
However, I agree that they should have just one competition, not separate ones.
I am rarely shocked by Professor Turley’s posts, although I frequently disagree with his opinions.
However I must say that this post shocked me. I feel at a loss to have to explain the obvious fact that men and women are different. Our bodies are different and our brains are different. This is a scientific fact.
It is the kind of scientific fact you rarely find on Google anymore since Google has an agenda. To paraphrase it, men and women create pathways in the brain differently. Men’s pathways tend to be more linear, women’s tend to be more like looking at chicken’s footprints scratching around in the dirt and I don’t mean that offensively. Women simply create pathways that are more organic than linear. This enables us to do a lot of things better than men, but chess is not one of them.
Fundamentally, Title IX was designed to protect women, not men who want to be women, or pretend to be women, or identify as women, or whatever language we’re using. What we’re finding is that men are better at everything- including being women. Acting like women should just stand aside and suck it up and smile for the cameras as all that we fought to achieve is stolen from us by men is just misogyny by any other name.
Men are better at math and logic. Men have a flatter distribution in math and logic.
While it is true women are exceedingly rare in the xNTx quadrant of the Myers-Briggs personality scale, something less than 2%, where logic and analysis dominate; I am forced to wonder whether or not this is due to social conditioning and expectations.
Ah the “blank slate” explanation. Brilliant analysis.
You have to admit women who are not emotionally driven and who come across as coolly analytical are treated as if there is something wrong with them. My wife is an ENTP and has told me throughout her life she was bullied and hectored, accused of being everything from a robot to a lesbian.
And women that are not *NT* were:are not bullied or made fun of? Kids will find what bothers you and attack it. As an*NT* myself, I am surprised it bothered her – maybe she is a borderline *NT*. Seems she might be more feeling.
She scores at the extremes in all 4 quadrants, just like I do on the INTP scale. FWIW I’m not talking about regular bullying, I mean physical assault and a few other things I won’t discuss.
Both of us find it extremely difficult to even be around Feelers. Their lack of logic is infuriating.
She probably identifies as an *NT*. As a prototypical *NT*, I understand the desire. We could settle this with a chess match.
She might be an accountant or autistic. I think they’re all like that.
She spent the 20 years before we met as a decorative concrete contractor. Today we own an executive recruiting firm and also do web design and business consulting.
There’s a bell curve aspect to it. Females are a a small share of players, about 15 percent as noted. However, the upper tail end of the distribution is entirely dominated by males. Of the top 100 players rated by the International Chess Federation, 0 percent are female. The top active female chess player, Yifan Hou (ICF rating 2628), is ranked 149th. The top male player is Magnus Carlsen (ICF rating 2835). There’s a big gap between a 2835 and a 2628 rating. Were it the case that the tournaments were open to both sexes, there would be next to no female tournament winners.
Thanks, Jimbo. You nailed it, and there’s NO reliable research that suggests gender transitioning alters that bell curve. When one adds in the possibility of fraudulent gender claims, it would make women’s chess just another political football (ahem).
The Chess Foundation isn’t run by cretins. Do we really need to kibbutz every dang decision to satisfy the gender NAZI’s?
Yet, even assuming that there is some reason to have separate competitions, the ban on transgender women seems entirely gratuitous and wrong.
Entirely gratuitous and wrong because . . . ? Why? If there are separate categories for men and women, it only makes sense to say that men cannot compete against women, even if the man says he feels like a woman. It’s called reality.
The complaint here is really that there should not be separate categories for men and women. 90% of this article is dedicated to that assertion, which makes total sense: there is a material distinction between a physical competition and a purely mental one. However, throwing in statements like the one above makes no sense at all unless it’s followed by the word “because” with some convincing reason given. Here, it is a bald assertion that lacks any logical support.