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International Chess Federation (FIDE) to ban and punish transgender players
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Why are men and women separated in chess competition at all? There is no logical reason other than sexism and transphobia. The reason the top women in the world are so far below the top men is because chess has historically been a man's game and the history of and continued sexism has no doubt kept out women who could be just as good as the best men. I play chess regularly online and have lost to both men and women. I wouldn't be surprised if several top chess players chose to leave fide in favor of other competitions over this.
Having the current best female chess player, Hou Yifan, be at rank 55 and be the third woman ever to be in the top 100, while the second best woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, is at rank 347, doesn't exactly paint a very gender-balanced playing field.
I think the point is that the field should be left alone. Let players of both genders rank wherever they do. Seems odd to separate the genders for a non-physical sport.
In a way they are as there is no "men only" tournaments. There is open for all, and a few women only. You just won't see any women in the open for all tournaments as they fail to qualify so ending the womens tournaments would just result in having no female competitors at all.
They do that, in the men's division. The men's division is open. Anyone can participate.
There are 16 times as many male chess players than women so men dominate the open category by sheer number alone, it's basic statistics.
As such the woman's category is not so much a separate thing but a subset of the open one and if nothing else it provides visibility and a competitive field where women can deal with female instead of male asshole competitors so they can comfortably be catty queen bees instead of learning how to chest thumb.
Then you will get all the top tournaments with maybe a few women, none of them will likely win (based on current ranking), which will cause possibly even less women to try chess and reinforce the vicious circle (less win also equals less money, less sponsors). Basically, after that you will get protests as well.
Do you think that activities that are dominated by a certain gender are that way "naturally", or would you maybe agree that societal factors and sexism play a role too? The idea of "just leave things alone and let people do what they want" often ignores the subtle way that men and women are encouraged towards or discouraged away from those activities.