International Chess Federation, FIDE, has released new guidelines targeting transgender players. The guidelines would strip trans men’s titles, and potentially bar trans women from playing.

In recent months, the discussion surrounding transgender participation in sports has intensified. Several sports organizations have ruled that transgender women cannot participate in their competitions. This trend has expanded beyond traditional sports like swimming, touching even disc golf and billiards, based on perceived “advantages” of transgender athletes. The reaction to trans people in competition has grown to include non-sporting contests like beauty pageants and Jeopardy! after seeing transgender success. Now, FIDE, the world’s foremost international chess organization, has introduced guidelines that would revoke titles from transgender men and bar many transgender women from competing, asserting that trans women "have no right to participate.”

The regulations, reported online by French transgender FIDE master, Yosha Iglesias, spell out a list of policy changes that apply to transgender competition in chess. Among the policy changes:

Transgender men must relinquish their women-category titles after transitioning.

Transgender women can keep their previous titles.

Transgender women have “no right to compete” in the women’s division.

Transgender women will be “evaluated” by the FIDE Council on if they will be allowed to compete in a process that may take up to 2 years.

FIDE can mark transgender players as “transgender” in their files.

Gender changes must be “comply with the player’s national laws” and may include birth certificate documents (despite many nations refusing to change transgender birth certificates)

See the main page on transgender participation from the organization:

The unveiling of these regulations drew widespread ridicule, with numerous individuals challenging the notion that transgender women possess a “natural advantage” in chess. According to the chess news site Chessbase, the women’s category in chess exists to encourage increased participation among women, not because women inherently perform at a lower level in the game. Thus, the typical arguments against transgender women competing don’t hold water, as it’s implausible to claim that transgender women have an unfair advantage.

This isn’t the first instance of scrutiny regarding transgender participation in non-physical competitions. In 2022, transgender Jeopardy champion Amy Schneider set the record as the highest-winning woman in Jeopardy history. Following her success, several anti-trans voices online claimed she unfairly took the title from “real women,” suggesting that transgender women possess an inherent advantage in trivia over cisgender women.

The regulations are harmful and discriminatory towards transgender individuals. The logic behind revoking titles from transgender men transitioning from the women’s category is not explained anywhere in the document. Additionally, these rules would delay transgender women from competing for up to two years while their gender is examined, and could even prohibit them indefinitely. Given that the usual “unfair advantage” argument doesn’t logically apply in this context, these regulations appear to unfairly target transgender individuals while sidestepping even the usual arguments against trans competition.

The enforcement of these policies remains unclear. Iglesias took to Twitter, asking, “Am I woman enough?” She listed the FIDE council members, sharing photos that depict the majority as older cisgender men, adding, “these people will decide.” The documents don’t specify how decisions regarding a transgender member’s participation will be made. Until further clarity, transgender international chess players face uncertainty about their continued involvement in the sport.

  • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Transgender men must relinquish their women-category titles after transitioning.

    Transgender women have “no right to compete” in the women’s division.

    they really buried the lede here. ALL trans people are banned from participation in the women’s league.

    mfw chess is more transphobic than fucking starcraft. they’ve managed to outdo the gamers.

    edit: oh the other bit is even more infuriating. trans women aren’t allowed to compete at all until the people who wrote these horrific rules approve their transition progress by verifying fucking birth certificates.

  • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The hard truth:

    Studies have shown that being good at chess doesn’t mean you’re highly intelligent, it just means you really like chess.

    • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      yes, they’re not even being TERFS here, just flat out going full mask off with the misogyny alongside the transphobia.

        • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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          idk at least the normal TERF shit has the slightest veneer of concern for women if you don’t think about it seriously and do a little bit of reading for like 5 minutes, but I feel like even normies could look and see the blatant misogyny here ya know?

          • Outdoor_Catgirl [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Yeah a lot of terf rhetoric is basically just doing the wrong type of sexism. Women/trans men get called fragile dainty victims who need protection, men and trans women are described as

            cw sv mention

            hulking rape ogres ready to enact violence at any moment.

            Obviously there’s more to it, like right wing trans hate that repackages homophobic rhetoric, but this is one kind I see a lot.

    • trudge [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      No, this goes further than brains. It’s pure essentialism.

      These people believe that there is some man-essence that is created during conception and is then projected to onto your body, defining who you are.
      Even if you show them brain scans for transpeople that refutes everything they say, it doesn’t matter. This goes all the way back to the idea of immutability of the soul and such nonsense.

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Well except for saying transmen aren’t allowed their titles anymore retroactively unless they detransition. I guess cause people would get mad seeing Kai McMichaels listed as a Woman’s Cup Champ in 2016 or something.

    • gonk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      the majority of chess players are middle aged white men with no life and an alcohol problem who actually unironically think that

    • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      Chess has historically been Magic The Gathering before MTG, and so tournaments were full of smelly dudes who snubbed women’s participation and radiated misogyny. The solution at the time was chess affirmative action.

    • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      Basically, Chess began as a nobleperson’s game, and both genders were highly rated. In the 17th and 18th century these filted down to the upper-middle classes via the Coffee Shops and Salons (one mostly male, the other gender neutral but mostly female-led) where it became the preferred game of the failson, and from there percolated into the closed gentleman’s clubs of the regency.

      After the reaction of the Congress of Vienna, the Salons and Coffee shops were suppressed. Women’s rights, already under attack by wrong-headed “Natural Law” Bourgois Liberals, were sharply curtailed and even reversed due to the politically radical nature of these salons. With Coverture restored and implied property rights sharply curtailed, the upper and upper middle class women who previously led active social lives were removed, save for courtesans.

      So chess stopped being a game women played in public, while in the Gentleman’s clubs and the men-only restaurants it became the prime pastime of men with no day job. Chess institutions were formed by men-only institutions, allowed only men to train, and allowed only men to compete. Women eventually formed their own associations as society liberalised in the 1870s/80s, and championships in the late 1920s but these were segregated, underfunded, and regarded as an occasional pastime rather than a full time pursuit.

      It wasn’t until the 1960s and women liberation that the idea that women could play Chess competitively even occurred to people, at least outside the Soviet Union. There were legal cases and everything to allow Women to play open tournaments.

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      There is a case that promoting a womens’ division could be a way to get women as a whole interested in the game, since they’ll have an automatic foothold that way.

  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    The chess community is the absolute worst, more insufferable than any gaming community. Chess players are exactly the same kind of nerds as your average league of legends gamer, except they’re also boomers and unlike league players they don’t have the humility from being mocked for it, instead people kiss their feet because they think playing chess is some high IQ activity.

    Half the reason I don’t play chess anymore is because so many chess players are insufferable manchildren who think they’re god’s gift to earth. Just listen to Kasparov’s moronic takes about women’s brains being “unfit for extended conflict” as a reason for why they’re just genetically worse at chess, only for him to lose to Judit Polgar later and rush off in an embarrassing, immature tantrum.

    Fuck chess players. Fuck FIDE. Chess players should be bullied more. I literally have more respect for Fortnite kids.

  • Xianshi@lemm.ee
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    Not sure why gender would even matter in chess. It seems weird to make the distinction, just let two people sit across from each other and play.

    • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      because chess has historically been an extremely misogynistic field (and still is, if not quite so overt), so there’s still a huge imbalance in the field, just like how women are underrepresented in tech.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Have had some convos about this with friends, they think it’s weird that chess is still segregated by gender but I gave them this rationalization, that to promote women it made sense to separate them as a temporary measure until women have equal standings. But now I’m not sure FIDE had separate categories for that reason at all, it really is just misogyny.

        • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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          Eh, I think the misogyny is more just that the separate category itself isn’t a bad idea, but it’s not nearly enough oh its own, FIDE needs to actively work to stamp out misogyny from the “open” category, as it is now it’s just a pandering gesture to try and appear like it’s truly motivated to actually combat misogyny, it’s kinda like affirmative action here in the states vs. an actually progressive country where it’s just one small policy out of many.

          • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            That’s true and it’s why I considered it acceptable before, but if they truly believe women are equal to men in their ability to play chess why would they ever care about trans people being in the “wrong” category? It’s just a real headscratcher.

            • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              could just be more towards transphobia, in that they’re just actively trying to make sure they suffer even more, especially transwomen

      • btbt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        The best thing about the chess boom that’s happened in the last few years is that normal people who do things like taking showers and going outside on a regular basis have become a much larger part of the community

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        because chess has historically been an extremely misogynistic field

        No wonder reddit-logo circlejerked about chess so hard for years and compared anything else they wanted to circlejerk about to dae le chess.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I don’t want to dislike it at all but the fandom is really shitty and has been shitty for a long time.

            Before someone pulls a false equivalency, no, some fandoms are shittier than others, especially when the fandom makes the organization rules such as in chess.

            • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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              some fandoms are shittier than others

              do people really deny that? I wasn’t even aware that was a controversial statement…

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                do people really deny that? I wasn’t even aware that was a controversial statement…

                Yes, and verbatim. It’s usually phrased as “all fandoms are just as good and bad as any other fandom” which is a staggeringly unlikely false equivalency.

                I’m pretty sure stamp collectors aren’t known for Heated G!mer moments, for example.

                I also doubt badminton is known for hooligan riots after tournaments.

                • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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                  what a weird take, it all just resolves around how the original creator/highest body chooses to set the tone, gaming fandoms that actively stomp on bigotry have just fine communities (relatively, at least), and all the worst ones you can think of are from like multiplayer games from companies who refuse to invest the money into actually changing the culture of their games.

            • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              I don’t want to dislike it at all but the fandom is really shitty and has been shitty for a long time.

              I’ve been trying to ignore this and learn to play online anyway and it’s rough. this decision from FIDE is the last straw for me and I’m giving up - this fanbase is just way too toxic to tolerate.

  • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    we just are smarter, taller, bigger, faster, stronger, and more beautiful

    everyone should be afraid, we are going to kill god sicko-fem

  • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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    disgusting transphobic pieces of garbage, unbelievable that they’re still trying to use the same fucking argument with fucking chess, stfu-terf now shut the fuck up, turn and face the wall