Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id588120314
Under the new policy, trans women are banned by default from competing in women-only chess tournaments. (There are no bans for all-gender events.) To get around this ban, players must provide documentation that any changes to their gender meet all the requirements of their local government. Even then, FIDE says, “further analysis” would be needed until a trans woman gets the green light to play—a vague process that FIDE says could take up to two years. In addition, any trans men who won women’s titles before their transition will have those titles taken away, while trans women retain theirs.
id588120284
the chess ban clearly implies that trans women might have an intellectual advantage over cisgender women.
id588134094
“However, in chess as a sport other factors like physical endurance may play a role.” (In other words, women are as smart as men, but perhaps not as good at sitting in a chair for a while and thinking about where a little horse should go on a board. How empowering.)
id588134307
these rules are based not on science but on misogyny. Whatever FIDE says, there is no reason to ban trans women from competing against cis women in a chess competition unless you believe that men (because people who discriminate against trans women see them as “biological men” and believe a person’s sex to be an immutable binary) are smarter than women—or that there is something so inherently vile about trans people that cis people must be protected from them even while playing a board game.
id588134402
trans women were also recently banned from the Miss Italy beauty competition, so trans women are also apparently prettier than cis women—add it to the list of things trans women excel at
id588134476
these policies were never actually about fairness in competition, but about erasing trans people’s ability to participate in public life. There is plenty of evidence that shows that “fairness” is much more complicated than blanket statements or bans regarding hormones or chromosomes or genitals could ever account for. But these discriminatory policies and the people who make them have shown no interest in engaging with trans people to find ways to include—rather than exclude—them. They also seem wholly uninterested in hearing about the harm that this kind of discrimination does to trans folks.