The international chess federation known as FIDE has published new rules that state that a person whose “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”.
The new rules introduce the following changes:
- Trans women cannot participate in the women’s category unless they are explicitly allowed in a case-by-case process that can take up to two years.
- Trans men will be stripped of their titles achieved before their transition while trans women will retain their titles achieved before their transition.
- In case a trans person is allowed to participate, their trans condition will be added to their files and communicated to events organizers.
So a protected category for women only, because of social factors rather than inherent physical differences.
This makes some sense to me based on my own experiences in other areas like mathematics and science competitions. The boys in my school who knew me were mostly alright but it was still a very strange environment to be a teenage girl in. I was always keenly aware of being an outsider. And it was so much worse in rooms full of strangers at competitions. Intimidating and overwhelming.
For all that I was consistently at or near the top in our school, I always fell at the outside competitions. Felt horrible too, that I was letting everyone down. I was too young to understand the sexism at play so I just beat myself up about it and stopped participating.
In general, I support protected categories for women. We haven’t come anywhere near far enough in reducing sexism to make them unnecessary. I don’t know if it’s a big enough issue with trans women in competitive chess to make this sort of ruling. It might have the balance wrong. But it would be good if there was more understanding of what these kinds of environments can be like for cis girls and women.
Right, so the transphobic fear the FIDE has is that men might try to exploit a loophole by “posing” as trans. So they have these severe restrictions on who might be considered transitioned, why they will “alert” tournaments that someone is trans, why they require legal proof of transitioning before giving in and why they’re stripping trans men of their titles (so that if a cis man manages circumvent all these protection by successfully posing as a trans woman and having won all these titles transitions back, he no longer has them).
It’s the same trans-panic as in so many other sport federations. Severe legislation hurting trans people trying to pre-empt a completely made up cheating scenario.
edit: (hopefully) clarified the wording