Chess is a feminist issue.

[ArabeIIaKarenScott]

https://twitter.com/mikesalter74/status/1692011020032868405

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-gender-chess-players-lose-titles-biological-birth-jhfdckm0c

'Transgender women will be banned from competing in top-level female chess tournaments while the game’s governing body adjudicates whether they have an unfair advantage.'

This appalling situation will lead to depression and suicide attempts," Iglesias said.

Imagine a woman publicly threatening suicides because she didn’t get her way about a minor sporting event. Even one who had justifiable reasons to be upset and angry - one of the swimmers who competed against Lia Thomas, say. You think she’d get a sympathetic reception from the public?

Why does anyone take these people and their temper tantrums seriously? Oh yeah, I know Y.

Exactly. Women are meant to stand on the silver podium and stay silent. No feelings. No upset. Smile whilst your fair competition is erased

Bollocks to that

Love the Y - so true

I think chess is one of those activities that males excel in when you look at the extreme ends of various spectrums of ability/tendency/skill. Chess relies on spatial and strategic skills that are associated with the left hemisphere of the brain - which is larger in males than in females. I don't think it is controversial to say that. I used to play in chess tournaments as a child, as did my daughter - and we were always one of the few girls in attendance.

I went to an all girls's secndary school and we had a chess club. The one stand out player was an unusual girl, in many respects. Not only did she have a glass eye ( which she would take out in chemistry lessons), but she was a cross channel swimmer too.

Y are your feelings more important than ours?

Thank you ArabellaKarenScott - that article has helped to job my memory I believe originally chess was a war game strategy tool for planning offensives and defensives - obviously no women, just levels of power given to the male pieces. I do think the background of the rise in power of the Queen piece is a really strong story to tell girls starting to play chess .

Girls chess needs to be protected and developed and I'm very pleased FIDE are going to do so.

There is a very strong woman player at my son's club - around 2000 ELO - and when she plays she gets a big crowd watching from the younger players, both boys and girls. It's great to see her influence showing the younger girls that they can be as good as the strongest male players if they study and play seriously.

As with most spectrums you will get a large cluster around the averages and they are as likely to be female as they are male -and that goes for chess too - but at the extreme end of genius ( certainly in chess/maths/engineering) you will find it is predominantly male.

Really interesting thanks OP (and thanks for that nice clear Twitter thread). Well done FIDE for stepping in in advance of the problems. That's intelligent forward thinking from the chess community there.

Thanks for sharing this, I haven’t had the headspace to look up the justification for keeping a women’s and an open tournament for chess.

Most people know where they personally stand on the trans situ, so I won’t comment there. However, I think it’s codswallop to have a gender divide in what is an intellectual, not physical, sport.

If the the justification is to keep a women’s event, because women hardly ever win in mixed events, then you’re creating a handicapped environment for women to compete, which presents them as intellectually subordinate to the men’s event, and men in general.

I think, in an intellectual game, Women will rise through the ranks if challenged by appropriate competitors regardless of their gender. Happy to be challenged on that.

I suppose the concern would be that the gender reassignment exemption for sport in s.195 of the EA only applies to “gender-affected activity” which the EA appears to define as physical sports only.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/195

its a valid concern that this might be challenged.

Chess is where we should have mixed competitions.

Sexism in chess is absolutely rife.The exclusion of transwoman is not coming from a good place for women. Its coming from the wholehearted believe that men are without doubt superior to women in chess.

This was very clear at every point of the junior

Organisers make it clear the male participants are considered to be naturally better, male trophies often bigger, organisers more likely to give discretionary awards to the boys make regular sexist comments.

Will put a lot if girls off, certainly put DD off and she had the potential to be quite good.

Focusing on the trans stuff misses the far bigger problem

There IS mixed competition, open.
Your DD has two options, open for mixed or women category. What about this makes you think that your DD is missing out in any way?

I don't think they are relying on the gender-affected sport exception. It's "positive action" to increase participation of an underrepresented group that shares a protected characteristic.

@Thatcat you say you "don't have the headspace to look up the justification for keeping a separate women's competition..." but then you immediately follow up.by saying it's "codswallop" to do so.

There is a valid debate to be had about whether retaining separate women's competitions (alongside open competitions, in which virtually all female players also compete) is the right way forward. But this debate is not helped by those who have not done any background research, or talked with any chess players, leaping in with an opinion.

This is an initiative intended to grow the pool of talented women players.

As always, the trans identity is not the issue - it's being male which makes men claiming to be women in ineligible for competitions which are intended to encourage women and girls to play and give them a taste for success.

Any women who are good enough can enter open competitions alongside the men/men claiming to be women.

Ah right, so s.158. I really must stop seeing everything through the lens of sport!

I fully support the need for a female category to encourage women and girls to compete.

In the meantime, this has been an interesting discussion to follow on Twitter.

Carole Hoovlet on Twitter. 20.51 17/8/23

I'm quote-tweeting this because my initial response generated a lot of discussion and I want to get it right. (FYI my dissertation was on sex differences in spatial ability, so I'm sure that's biased my view of this issue.)

It's funny that I asked for help from Chris Chabris @cfchabris on this sex differences in chess question, because he's a highly ranked chess player and an expert in intelligence. And he thanked me for "helpful conversations" in his 2006 paper on this very topic (below). Which I admit to forgetting about (the paper, and the fact that I helped him with it in some way).

Chris and Mark Glickman found that the larger pool of male chess players appears to contribute to, or even explain the male advantage (someone on here suggested this). But why are males more interested in chess in the first place? Many non-spatial factors contribute to chess success, including other aspects of cognition, but also interest in the activity, desire to stick with it (over the course of a single game or longer), drive to win, etc, and a sex difference in any of these areas could play a role in the male advantage. We don't have great research on the various contributions, or their origins. So in my original tweet, I may have overstated the importance of spatial ability to the male advantage (as I commented right after I posted that tweet!).

The important thing is that if a girl (or woman) is motivated to learn and excel at chess, she will improve with practice and if she loves it, she should play her heart out! She might even beat many men or even become a chess master.

But in any event: even if biology is not found to be a strong contributor to the sex difference, particularly given we don't know the cause of the male advantage, the fact that it exists is reason enough to keep the female category for females, which is the best way to give females a chance to win.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01828.x?casa_token=fFrGmtb8zqEAAAAA%3A0fTQs-UkjhKnTO2yaiJUhmy9yNQrXLPr1kEsInDbNuzvP0jm0CTTM71EFzSyZXvprf19L9V-cpbv&journalCode=pssa

twitter.com/hoovlet/status/1692262830219596050?s=12

It isn’t quite as cut and dried that there is no testosterone advantage. The research is ongoing.

I believe women can compete with men at chess if they want, it's just that there is a separate women's league as the disparity between men and women coming anywhere near the top was so great. Research has shown women play better when they believe they're playing against a woman even though the difficulty level is the same (it was via an online game) which is interesting. Seems there are a lot of reasons as to why men are more prolific, successful and better at chess typically than women.

Juniors were certainly segregated. The attitudes I discussed came from the juniors.

The attitudes presented made the whole system seem fundamentally old fashioned.

With apologies I meant to clarify I was referring to the juniors

I can appreciate why the idea of segregating for that purpose is theoretically beneficial.

It just doesn't always come over that way.

My jaw absolutely dropped at comments made at junior championships that were considered absolutely normal (And tbf i heard more because i was allowed in the main tournament rooms due to DS's sen). I personally didn't consider it a particularly healthy environment for a young girl. And of course the nature of chess is that if you dont catch them young and they dont therefore engage in the training and practice they are unlikely to achieve the same chess abilities as the boys that have.

Doesn't matter if you allow equal competition at adulthood if youve lost the potential female grand masters at primary.

The sex divide is being engrained in.

Banning transwomen in female sports where there is absolutely no inbuilt benefit to being a man is sending entirely the wrong impression

If your told that the best girls aren't as good as the best boys. If the best boys are consistently given the better ranked trainer for example. Girls will go in with a more confident mindset when faced with a female than a male.

I don't know how it's organised at junior or senior level but I would have thought it's like single sex schools - girls will do better learning from and competing with other girls. And they would be away from negative comments about boys being better. Anyway, we'll see how it goes, won't we?

I can think of ONE junior competition (the UK schools chess challenge) which is genuinely segregated, i.e. the boys section is boys and not open. Any junior serious about chess will only be playing in this as one of many different types of competition.

Fair point @FraterculaArctica.
I’m not a competitive player and haven’t spoken to women on the issue.

But I don’t have to have written a thesis on chess to know women’s sport is always regarded as subpar and secondary to men’s. We’ll always be physically different in terms of strength for physical sport. Intellectual/mental/tactical sport, we are equal, yet men take that elite trophy too, because they remain unchallenged by elite women.

If the argument is that women essentially feel safer playing other women, then fine - their choice. But that is also a choice to not achieve your full potential because of your gender. I still think that’s codswallop.

If we let this play out in life, we’d never go to work with men, where most of us at some point or another had been intimidated/bullied/treated as a lesser being. We shouldn’t have to of course, but experience has shown the only way over it is through it.

https://chessdailynews.com/why-is-there-a-need-for-girls-or-womens-tournaments/

Thatcat

Maybe you should try talking to female chess players about the issue then.

Or at least read that article by Susan Polgar that has just been linked. It more than counters all your points.