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.
Silly question, why does chess, a mental activity, need gendered leagues?
Because the whole idea of gendered leagues in games that ultimately don’t matter at all is about segregation and control, not physiology.
Bring on the down votes from the “but muh sports 'tegridy!” clowns.
Edit: some of yall need a class on statistics lol
Anyone know what the highest rated trans male and trans female chess players are? Would be interesting to know if this rule is even currently necessary.
I don’t really follow. Do you mean only non/minimally physical competitions or all competitive sports/games/activities?
For things like chess, fishing, and spelling bees gender segregation doesn’t make sense. But for things like martial arts or weight lifting I think it makes sense.
It at least makes sense if the goal is competition between roughly similar groups of participants, and not just a single open class dominated by a particular physiology.
The only concession I can think of is things like crossfit games or Olympic weight lifting, where raw strength is the one and only point, or so central to the point that it’d be pointless to have men and women competing against one another. But things that require strategy or finesse like most sports, and definitely martial arts, women could absolutely be top contenders.
As humans we have hunted mammoths together, gone to the moon together, created computers together, etc. I think we can handle throwing and catching the balls together too.
TLDR there are many more aspects to most sports than raw physical strength, which is the only physiological “advantage” men have over women.
Why not set up divisions, among sports where the physiological differences do matter, based on the actual weight, strength etc of the individual participants, whatever traits are relevant to that sport, rather than by gender? Even if the average woman and the average man have, say, a strength difference, there are still going to be some women who are evenly matched with some subset of men, after all. I feel like such a system, if done well, could make things more competitive than simply sorting by gender, because it enables sports where the people who are not on the stronger end of what their gender is capable of to still face equivalent opponents, and would remove the whole reason for debate regarding trans athletes, because they could get put into the same categories as anyone else without their identity being invalidated or having any relevance to their performance.
It doesn’t in principle, and it’s not really either.
There is the main league, which is open for everyone, and an extra league for women only to offset the male dominance of the main league.
Why they feel the need to exclude trans women from that I have no idea. Even many of the physical sports allow trans women under certain conditions and only to prevent any unfair advantage due to increased muscle growth during puberty.
shaun did an excellent video on exactly this. TL;DW: stereotype threat & harassment.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=ZHFZOXiM9SM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Women have more places to hide the sex toys.
Edit: it’s a bad joke referencing the recent cheating scandal
Women gated off their league because every their move is commented on as a female one. They can’t fail for it’s deepens the stereotype of women=stupid and they can’t win for it’s just man wasn’t paying attention or played easy for her. The lack of women chess clubs and championships, the stereotype of it being not a sport for women is why there aren’t many high ELO players in this isolated and weird situation.
One of the last strongholds of a fragile male nerd supremacy, that’s all.
Have you met chess bros?
I can see why women would want their own league.
All of the pieces. On both sides of the board. Mentally it’s much more taxing keeping track of which pieces are yours. We guys have it really easy with the whole black/white pieces.
Because otherwise women couldn’t currently compete beyond the local level. But I don’t have an explanation for the difference in playing levels beyond the fact that much fewer women seem to be interested in playing Chess competitively.
No. First of all Chess has nothing to do with being smart in any sense I would use the word.
Otherwise a Raspberry Pi would outsmart all of humanity.
Secondly, it’s much more similar to why the Faroe Islands can’t compete in soccer with France.
Nothing suggests they have less natural talent for soccer (and it’s quite popular there), but there’s just 1/1000 the number of players to draw from.
There is an open bracket (where anyone can play) and a womens bracket, currently women do not perform well enough to play internationally in the open bracket. What they are stating are merely facts. And really were it not for the existence of the womens bracket it is possible that women would perform even worse.
