Transwomen are banned from women's chess!

[Sugarfree23]

I actually can't believe that Chess is separated into Women's & Open. The international chess federation have decided transwomen can't compete as women until the end of an enquiry that is expected to take 2 years!
BBC News link.

Excellent. They shouldn't ever be allowed to play with women as they are not women. It's quite self-explanatory.

Discussed here https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4874238-chess-is-a-feminist-issue

Well if it's a women's sport/competition etc,then of course this is the only appropriate decision.

It’s almost like those Chess players are being logical about the issue, isn’t it?

Good. They aren't women so shouldn't play as women

I have no idea why chess is separated into sex anyway surely this is one sport that should be genderless and inclusive

Have a read of the other thread Maddy it’s all explained at length there

Yes, this.

What k but why is chess segregated anyway? I played as a youngster and it was unisex! I'm all for women's categories in sports but chess isn't physical so surely women can compete against men!

So,having looked at those twitter posts, and just for the hard of thinking among us (me), am I right that the reason for splitting chess by sex is essentially to give women some chance of being able to qualify for tournaments and win something because men are otherwise way ahead, in both numbers playing and, currently, the level at which they play?

So on that basis, if trans women were to be included in the women's division then arguably if the male advantage continues after transition, and there is no reason to think it wouldn't, given taking oestrogen probably doesnt affect your skill at chess, it would potentially take places away from women?

Because otherwise, it does seem to be an odd decision, to divide the game by sex at all. However, the open category (which I assume has always existed rather than being purely a men's category?) presumably not only includes trans women, but also allows any woman whose standard is high enough to compete against everyone, to play against men? Something that is unlikely ever to be realistic in athletics, swimming or any other physical sport.

In that case, it does seem to make sense to divide in that way, but unless the 2 year review is to see if there is evidence that one's chess playing standard really does drop following transition, I am not sure what it is intended to achieve?

I would have thought so. Chess doesn't require physical strength and is anyone really suggesting male brains have an advantage over female?

This is exactly it. There are more men players and they mostly play at a higher level.

"I actually can't believe that Chess is separated into Women's & Open."

As all sports should be (well female and open). Then there is no issue of anyone who wants to claim any identity being in the open competition.

putting aside if women and men should be separated for this sport, that in my opinion is a totally different matter.

im just pleased to see a distinction has at last been made. A man wearing a dress is still a man, just as a woman wearing trousers is still a woman, end off. If this sport is split into the TWO sexes then regardless to what the contestants wear that’s that.

but unless the 2 year review is to see if there is evidence that one's chess playing standard really does drop following transition, I am not sure what it is intended to achieve?

I have no insider knowledge tbc I've not played chess since school. I suspect they are mostly kicking the can down the road. And in two years if this entire shitshow hasn't ended, they will think of something else to kick the can again down the road.

So it'll be oh heres our results of our review, we need to take time to thoroughly understand it >another year, oh darn, we forgot to review this particular unnecessary bit of the sexes playing, another 2 year review ahead. Until finally without fear or favour they can just say, women and open, no excuses.

Katy Montgomerie reacted to the rule change angrily, tweeting: 'In banning trans women from chess the insane anti-trans lobby has fully revealed their hand.
'They don't just believe that sex is a non-material immutable binary, they also think that women are intellectually inferior. Which is what we've been saying they believe from the start.'
This person not understanding what it's like to be a woman at all and getting a dig in about women's intellect too.
There are other reasons women need a separate category - chess may not be a physical game but women are physical, we menstruate and have children for a start.

Boys and girls have historically been treated very differently during childhood and often encouraged into different activities by both their parents and the school. Girls may for example have been taken to ballet/gymnastics/art while boys are more likely to have been taken to football/chess/coding clubs. Even though that is less the case these days, we are discussing here the adult categories for people had their childhoods in previous years.

Where there is an adult activity at which men routinely achieve much higher scores than women, as with chess, it makes sense for there to be a women’s category so that women who didn’t have male privilege growing up can still have their achievements recognised.

Allowing transwomen in the women’s category would be ludicrous because transwomen grow up as male, with male privilege, and the purpose of the women’s category is to provide a competitive space for chess players who didn’t grow up with male privilege.

If you erase women’s categories that just means that men dominate. Look what happened with the Brit awards. To please trans activists they erased the “best female artist” category and replaced it with “best artist”. In 2023 every single nominee for that category was male.

What's the reason for separating women?

This might be useful on this thread.

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.

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

https://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.

Unsure why misogyny is being celebrated in the feminism chat!? I was an avid chess player in my youth and I don’t see how being male incurs any advantage!!! Surely this is the chess association saying that men are better at chess than women in simple terms.

This is an excellent explanation and true of so much more than chess. Thank you for posting.

That makes a lot of sense.

When I posted last nights I didn't realise their was already a thread on the subject.

So on one hand I was thinking fantastic trans are being removed from the women's category. But on the other I was thinking why is Chess segregated by sex anyway, surely there isn't any physical advantage for males over female in Chess which is more of a game than a physical sport.

For a period of about 10 years, I gave birth to and raised 3 children. I was permanently exhausted and overworked. I had no spare time or energy. When I was pregnant, I would go to bed virtually as soon as the oldest or both children were asleep.

I love chess and would love to play more. But I had to take 10 years off, virtually from life! A man who had 10 years more practice will beat me - being a mother takes more of a toll than being a man or father, in most cases.

We don’t understand how the brain functions. Men outperform women at chess. This could be due to nature or nurture, who knows. We do know men outperform women at chess, though. We don’t need to know why. I’m perfectly content to believe there might be brain differences that mean men and women have different statistical distributions of ability for certain tasks. We really cannot say for certain what causes the different statistical distributions. We don’t have enough information. But it doesn’t matter. The statistical differences exist and are sex based.