The world’s top chess federation has ruled that transgender women cannot compete in its official events for females until an assessment of gender change is made by its officials.
Oof. Fucking FIDE. Trans women should be able to compete in the women’s sections.
About the gender gap - the gender gap in performance is a statistical relic of the participation gap. Control for participation and the performance gap vanishes.
Women’s sections exist to help promote participation and competition in that cohort. Its the same reason junior sections for kids exist, senior sections for older adults exist, and ratings limited sections like U1200 and U1500 exist.
Unlike other sports, a trans person would have no physiological advantage or disadvantage competing across gendered sections.
The fact that this is a stupid thing to do aside, what does “assessment of gender change” even mean? Like, are they gonna go hand you a quiz to find out how “wOmAnLiKe” you are or something
Unlike many other sports, I honestly don’t see how chess is impacted by gender, nor why we’d have different leagues other than legacy historical strangeness. If I were king for a day, I’d just get rid of gendered leagues for chess. Everyone plays in an open league.
