International Chess Federation, FIDE, has released new guidelines targeting transgender players. The guidelines would strip trans men's titles, and potentially bar trans women from playing.
In recent months, the discussion surrounding transgender participation in sports has intensified. Several sports organizations have ruled that transgender women cannot participate in their competitions. This trend has expanded beyond traditional sports like swimming, touching even disc golf and billiards, based on perceived “advantages” of transgender athletes. The reaction to trans people in competition has grown to include non-sporting contests like beauty pageants and Jeopardy! after seeing transgender success. Now, FIDE, the world’s foremost international chess organization, has introduced guidelines that would revoke titles from transgender men and bar many transgender women from competing, asserting that trans women "have no right to participate.”
The regulations, reported online by French transgender FIDE master, Yosha Iglesias, spell out a list of policy changes that apply to transgender competition in chess. Among the policy changes:
Transgender men must relinquish their women-category titles after transitioning.
Transgender women can keep their previous titles.
Transgender women have “no right to compete” in the women’s division.
Transgender women will be “evaluated” by the FIDE Council on if they will be allowed to compete in a process that may take up to 2 years.
FIDE can mark transgender players as “transgender” in their files.
Gender changes must be “comply with the player’s national laws” and may include birth certificate documents (despite many nations refusing to change transgender birth certificates)
See the main page on transgender participation from the organization:
The unveiling of these regulations drew widespread ridicule, with numerous individuals challenging the notion that transgender women possess a “natural advantage” in chess. According to the chess news site Chessbase, the women’s category in chess exists to encourage increased participation among women, not because women inherently perform at a lower level in the game. Thus, the typical arguments against transgender women competing don't hold water, as it's implausible to claim that transgender women have an unfair advantage.
This isn't the first instance of scrutiny regarding transgender participation in non-physical competitions. In 2022, transgender Jeopardy champion Amy Schneider set the record as the highest-winning woman in Jeopardy history. Following her success, several anti-trans voices online claimed she unfairly took the title from “real women,” suggesting that transgender women possess an inherent advantage in trivia over cisgender women.
The regulations are harmful and discriminatory towards transgender individuals. The logic behind revoking titles from transgender men transitioning from the women’s category is not explained anywhere in the document. Additionally, these rules would delay transgender women from competing for up to two years while their gender is examined, and could even prohibit them indefinitely. Given that the usual "unfair advantage" argument doesn't logically apply in this context, these regulations appear to unfairly target transgender individuals while sidestepping even the usual arguments against trans competition.
The enforcement of these policies remains unclear. Iglesias took to Twitter, asking, "Am I woman enough?" She listed the FIDE council members, sharing photos that depict the majority as older cisgender men, adding, "these people will decide." The documents don't specify how decisions regarding a transgender member's participation will be made. Until further clarity, transgender international chess players face uncertainty about their continued involvement in the sport.
Transgender men must relinquish their women-category titles after transitioning.
Transgender women have “no right to compete” in the women’s division.
they really buried the lede here. ALL trans people are banned from participation in the women's league.
mfw chess is more transphobic than fucking starcraft. they've managed to outdo the gamers.
edit: oh the other bit is even more infuriating. trans women aren't allowed to compete at all until the people who wrote these horrific rules approve their transition progress by verifying fucking birth certificates.
no that's my point. not only is she allowed to compete, the same orgs list her as the best female starcraft player. there's the occasional bigot who can't shut up about her but they get shouted down by the other
Yeah she's had some support the whole time, increasing over the years since SC2 came out, but also plenty of online people have been absolutely horrible the whole time, because of course
Scarlett is a real anomaly. She's been around since forever, way before trans discourse became a mainstream thing. I think if she entered the scene today, there'd be a lot more talk about her but she's just kinda always been there so she's accepted.
Transgender men must relinquish their women-category titles after transitioning.
From my understanding, AFAICP (assigned female at initial chess playing) get retconned to match their current chess-assigned gender. Anyway, death to FIDE of course.
The hard truth:
Studies have shown that being good at chess doesn't mean you're highly intelligent, it just means you really like chess.
Chess players are very easy to outsmart. They never expect a pawn to move diagonally 4 spaces and punch them in the face.
chess players really are the highest stage of international rules-based order dweebs
we're getting such a good mileage out of :smuglord: it has become my favorite emoji
Chess is yet another thing that was ruined by the fall of the USSR.
but the kind Vladimir Ilyich would shoot everyone here, including the chess nerds
i yearn to see magnus carlson swing from a petrol station sign
My pawn activates his Rage and charges the queen with his Greataxe. He gets advantage against nobility.
I would say this is true of IQ tests as well. Like if you can get training in it and improve then it isn’t about innate intelligence at all
Someone tried teaching me but tbh I don't really have the attention span for lame and boring things. Games like Catan are way more fun.
I got a bit into chess as a kid and I'm a lot better than the average person and I fully agree, it's mid
Wouldn't this mean the FIDE thinks that AMAB brains are "superior" to AFAB brains? Isn't that extremely fucked up?
yes, they're not even being TERFS here, just flat out going full mask off with the misogyny alongside the transphobia.
idk at least the normal TERF shit has the slightest veneer of concern for women if you don't think about it seriously and do a little bit of reading for like 5 minutes, but I feel like even normies could look and see the blatant misogyny here ya know?
Yeah a lot of terf rhetoric is basically just doing the wrong type of sexism. Women/trans men get called fragile dainty victims who need protection, men and trans women are described as
cw sv mention
hulking rape ogres ready to enact violence at any moment.
Obviously there's more to it, like right wing trans hate that repackages homophobic rhetoric, but this is one kind I see a lot.
No, this goes further than brains. It's pure essentialism.
These people believe that there is some man-essence that is created during conception and is then projected to onto your body, defining who you are.
Even if you show them brain scans for transpeople that refutes everything they say, it doesn't matter. This goes all the way back to the idea of immutability of the soul and such nonsense.Well except for saying transmen aren't allowed their titles anymore retroactively unless they detransition. I guess cause people would get mad seeing Kai McMichaels listed as a Woman's Cup Champ in 2016 or something.
the majority of chess players are middle aged white men with no life and an alcohol problem who actually unironically think that
Why the fuck is there gender segregation in a fucking board game in the first place
Chess has historically been Magic The Gathering before MTG, and so tournaments were full of smelly dudes who snubbed women's participation and radiated misogyny. The solution at the time was chess affirmative action.
There is a case that promoting a womens' division could be a way to get women as a whole interested in the game, since they'll have an automatic foothold that way.
Basically, Chess began as a nobleperson's game, and both genders were highly rated. In the 17th and 18th century these filted down to the upper-middle classes via the Coffee Shops and Salons (one mostly male, the other gender neutral but mostly female-led) where it became the preferred game of the failson, and from there percolated into the closed gentleman's clubs of the regency.
After the reaction of the Congress of Vienna, the Salons and Coffee shops were suppressed. Women's rights, already under attack by wrong-headed "Natural Law" Bourgois Liberals, were sharply curtailed and even reversed due to the politically radical nature of these salons. With Coverture restored and implied property rights sharply curtailed, the upper and upper middle class women who previously led active social lives were removed, save for courtesans.
So chess stopped being a game women played in public, while in the Gentleman's clubs and the men-only restaurants it became the prime pastime of men with no day job. Chess institutions were formed by men-only institutions, allowed only men to train, and allowed only men to compete. Women eventually formed their own associations as society liberalised in the 1870s/80s, and championships in the late 1920s but these were segregated, underfunded, and regarded as an occasional pastime rather than a full time pursuit.
It wasn't until the 1960s and women liberation that the idea that women could play Chess competitively even occurred to people, at least outside the Soviet Union. There were legal cases and everything to allow Women to play open tournaments.
Okay, can we stop pretending this is about men having an unfair advantage now
Some Random Enby: International Chess Org have "No Right To Continue Breathing"
Turns out chess wasn't the thinking person's game after all, what a bunch of bigoted morons.
Turns out the game just kind of sucked all along.
The numerous amount of Crypto shills in Chess spaces have been a pretty big giveaway
This is the most sexist thing I've heard today holy shit transphobes are something else
The chess community is the absolute worst, more insufferable than any gaming community. Chess players are exactly the same kind of nerds as your average league of legends gamer, except they're also boomers and unlike league players they don't have the humility from being mocked for it, instead people kiss their feet because they think playing chess is some high IQ activity.
Half the reason I don't play chess anymore is because so many chess players are insufferable manchildren who think they're god's gift to earth. Just listen to Kasparov's moronic takes about women's brains being "unfit for extended conflict" as a reason for why they're just genetically worse at chess, only for him to lose to Judit Polgar later and rush off in an embarrassing, immature tantrum.
Fuck chess players. Fuck FIDE. Chess players should be bullied more. I literally have more respect for Fortnite kids.
my impression is that there's a lot of gamers getting into chess now as well which is pretty awesome (read: cringe)
I'm told that after they got tired of stealing pens, toilets, and historical landmarks the younger zoomers have turned to online chess, to the point where it's causing disruption in schools.
the only reason men dominate chess is that there are fewer women players overall
as someone in a thread on chess dot com pointed out:
If it was a fact that women generally perform worse in chess than men, we would see a higher ratio of women in the lower elo rating, but that's not the case at all. Look at FIDE and chess .com statistics, men dominate even the lower elos. This just means that we don't generally play in chess as much as men, not a problem of intellect.
It was really about the men being big mad about the idea of losing to a woman
Zhang Shan moment (beat the men so hard at the olympics, they created a women's division so it wouldn't happen again)
Step one: Set up league to promote women in chess
Step two: Do nothing to promote it
Step three: Ban anyone not AFAB from that division using flagrant misogyny
Step four: Ask why feeeemales don't play chess
Chess used to be full of misogynistic dudes with flaming hot takes about women's intelligence. Still is but less nowadays. Leagues organized women's tournaments and ranks to give women a space to play without being harassed by losers
Not sure why gender would even matter in chess. It seems weird to make the distinction, just let two people sit across from each other and play.
because chess has historically been an extremely misogynistic field (and still is, if not quite so overt), so there's still a huge imbalance in the field, just like how women are underrepresented in tech.
Have had some convos about this with friends, they think it's weird that chess is still segregated by gender but I gave them this rationalization, that to promote women it made sense to separate them as a temporary measure until women have equal standings. But now I'm not sure FIDE had separate categories for that reason at all, it really is just misogyny.
Eh, I think the misogyny is more just that the separate category itself isn't a bad idea, but it's not nearly enough oh its own, FIDE needs to actively work to stamp out misogyny from the "open" category, as it is now it's just a pandering gesture to try and appear like it's truly motivated to actually combat misogyny, it's kinda like affirmative action here in the states vs. an actually progressive country where it's just one small policy out of many.
That's true and it's why I considered it acceptable before, but if they truly believe women are equal to men in their ability to play chess why would they ever care about trans people being in the "wrong" category? It's just a real headscratcher.
could just be more towards transphobia, in that they're just actively trying to make sure they suffer even more, especially transwomen
The best thing about the chess boom that’s happened in the last few years is that normal people who do things like taking showers and going outside on a regular basis have become a much larger part of the community
some fandoms are shittier than others
do people really deny that? I wasn't even aware that was a controversial statement..
what a weird take, it all just resolves around how the original creator/highest body chooses to set the tone, gaming fandoms that actively stomp on bigotry have just fine communities (relatively, at least), and all the worst ones you can think of are from like multiplayer games from companies who refuse to invest the money into actually changing the culture of their games.
I don't want to dislike it at all but the fandom is really shitty and has been shitty for a long time.
I've been trying to ignore this and learn to play online anyway and it's rough. this decision from FIDE is the last straw for me and I'm giving up - this fanbase is just way too toxic to tolerate.
we just are smarter, taller, bigger, faster, stronger, and more beautiful
everyone should be afraid, we are going to kill god
disgusting transphobic pieces of garbage, unbelievable that they're still trying to use the same fucking argument with fucking chess,
now shut the fuck up, turn and face the wall"Trans women's finger bone density gives them an unfair advantage over cis women's fragile finger bones. And also fuck trans men because they uh." - FIDE
how dare you. The good Vladimir Ilyich loved chess
always was
