International Chess Org: Trans Women Have "No Right To Participate" In Women's Chess
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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.

With these new rules, FIDE has managed to

  1. Imply the mental inferiority of women
  2. Validate the existence of transgender men
  3. Destroy the integrity of awards record-keeping
  4. Call transgender women men

Very nice, FIDE, incredible mental gymnastics performance! 👏 Add them to the ever lengthening sports federation shitlist.

  • FunctionFn@feddit.nl
    3·
    1 year ago

    Nah, I don’t buy it. The assumption with this line of thinking is that trans women don’t inherently belong to that class of participation. The majority of a group (cis women) do not get to unilaterally decide who is/is not a part of the greater group (women).

    If someone proposed a restricted class limited to PoC, it would be entirely appropriate to ask PoC what they think about the proposal.

    But following this analogy through, you’re not asking all PoC. You’re asking the majority of the subset (for example, black participants) whether a minority of the subset (for example, Asian participants) should be allowed to participate or not.

    In this case, the organizers of these tournaments are picking and choosing their own definitions for who qualify as “women” and listening only to those opinions. The decision is already made, and pointing to the remainder to justify the decision is working backwards from that conclusion.

    • RickRussell_CA@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      The assumption with this line of thinking is that trans women don’t inherently belong to that class of participation

      I don’t think it’s right to call it “an assumption”. By definition, a restricted competition class uses rules to establish who is allowed to participate. These rules are willfully and intentionally composed. When circumstances arise that make the rules ambiguous in some way, the participating community is called to clarify them.

      This isn’t unique to women’s chess, it applies to any restricted class sport or competition.

      But following this analogy through, you’re not asking all PoC. You’re asking the majority of the subset (for example, black participants) whether a minority of the subset (for example, Asian participants) should be allowed to participate or not.

      To be clear, I am not in any sense telling the chess world, much less women players, how to set the rules for their restricted class of competition. I am saying that women chess players are stakeholders in the rules of women’s chess. Precisely how their input is to be converted into a decision is not in my scope of understanding, and it would be presumptuous of me to hazard a guess at how they prefer to operate women’s chess.

      The decision is already made, and pointing to the remainder to justify the decision is working backwards

      Agreed, and that was not my intent.

      I genuinely don’t how or if women chess players were involved in this decision, I’m only responding to the assertion that asking “what cis women think about playing trans women” is morally equivalent to asking racists whether they want to play against black people. It paints current women players with a broad brush and disenfranchises them from the management of their own competition.

      • FunctionFn@feddit.nl
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m only responding to the assertion that asking “what cis women think about playing trans women” is morally equivalent to asking racists whether they want to play against black people.

        But I think this part is where the disconnect is happening. Before this decision, cis women and trans women were both components of women’s chess. The act of conferring with only a subset of that group implies that the other does not fall into that category. Relying only on the majority group’s opinion on the status of the minority group is itself an assumption that one of the groups inherently belongs less than the other.