Transgender chess players

[Chris Goodall]

A powerful and eloquent defence of separate female titles from Djuna there, and one which, given a casual glance around a typical chess tournament, could apply with equal force to separate titles for Black players.

[Matt Mackenzie]

Well just doing a crude statistical thing, females make up about half the population but are plainly majorly under-represented in chess at virtually all levels (the only possible exception may be the very youngest junior categories)

Whereas non-white people make up a rather smaller percentage of the UK (certainly smaller than you might think if you believe certain alarmist media or alt-right accounts) Yes they are still under-represented too - but to what degree exactly?

(you could, indeed, do a similar exercise with disabled people and chess)

[Geoff Chandler]

We know that Polgár qualified for the 1987 men's world championship interzonal tournament but was blocked from playing due to her gender.

Do we? According to Wikipedia, Judit was the first woman to qualify for an interzonal, and that was in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

Edited to correct 'women' to 'woman'

Hi Tim,

You may be unaware of this;



https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/zonals/1987-90.htm

I'm with Lawrence. This is a female matter.

[Kevin Thurlow]

Yes - apologies for the further digression, Hungarian chess officials were furious that the Polgars did not want to play "Women's" chess. Sadly, FIDE went along with this.

There are always problems with trying to (figuratively) label people and put them in boxes and it happens too much nowadays. It sounds OK to have events for women, juniors, seniors (two categories so far...), blind, deaf, and some events have had prizes for best disabled player. But where do you stop?

[Ian Thompson]

We know that Polgár qualified for the 1987 men's world championship interzonal tournament but was blocked from playing due to her gender.

Do we? According to Wikipedia, Judit was the first woman to qualify for an interzonal, and that was in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

You may be unaware of this;



https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/zonals/1987-90.htm

But that's referring to a qualification to a zonal tournament, not to an interzonal tournament.

[Paolo Casaschi]

At championship / professional level, I think it is unfair to other women. This is already seen in other sports, where talented women simply no longer see any point in competing and have given up. To me, that is a shame.

Is chess, not a physical sport, different? To some extent yes, but it is still clear that having spent one's formative years as a boy is advantageous at chess, whatever the reasons, and I would expect this to persist throughout adult life.

There's no point arguing personal opinions, but such policies should not be based on personal hunch.

The IOC has recently published some guidelines for sport federations to address this issue.

A couple of quotes from the IOC document:

6.1 Any restriction arising from eligibility criteria should be based on robust and peer reviewed research that ... demonstrates consistent, unfair, disproportionate competitive advantage in performance and/or an unpreventable risk to the physical safety of other athletes.

Did FIDE base their policy on robust and peer reviewed research or on a personal hunch?

8.1 When drafting, reviewing, evaluating and updating eligibility criteria sport organisations should meaningfully consult with a cross-section of athletes who might be negatively affected in order to prevent harm.

Did FIDE involve any of the players negatively impacted by the policy?

The IOC document is a very interesting reading, for example:

5.2 Until evidence determines otherwise, athletes should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage due to their sex variation, physical appearance and/or transgender status.

In other words, they explicitly recommend avoiding penalising a group of people for convenience while thinking about what should be done in the long term.

Any aspiration of FIDE for inclusion under the IOC umbrella is certainly not helped by the transgender policy announcement.

[Andrew Zigmond]

Slightly late to this discussion but as others have noted transgender players have until now been able to compete under their preferred gender up until now anyway. In the case of the UK there are relatively few female only tournaments in the first place. There are differing views on trans participation but very few circumstances where problems couldn't be sorted by compromise.

The example of a male player simply transitioning to gain advantage is a straw man argument - that individual would need to transition in all areas of their life and would be quickly caught out if they only did so for chess.

The other interesting point about the trans debate (it was in the news this week and we have seen it in this thread) is how many people - normally, it must be said, men - attack transgender people and then turn it around to say they're only speaking out for women and girls, when otherwise they have shown little or no previous interest in that topic.

[Roger de Coverly]

Indeed as late as 1986 FIDE increased the ratings of all female players (except Susan Polgár) by 100 in an attempt to correct for the fact that no other women played in men's tournaments.

That was always just a political anti-Polgar decision.

A number of British women players of that era had gained international ratings as the minimum rating for women was 1900 against 2200 for men. Generally speaking they acquired their ratings in events such as Hastings, Lloyds Bank Masters and the British Championship, mostly against male opposition. So it was faulty logic that women's events were segregated.

[Paul Cooksey]

The example of a male player simply transitioning to gain advantage is a straw man argument - that individual would need to transition in all areas of their life and would be quickly caught out if they only did so for chess.

I agree. The FIDE Management Board know better than anyone that high rated players are willing to do unethical things for money. But banning trans women to prevent men pretending to be trans women makes no sense.

[Roger de Coverly]

that individual would need to transition in all areas of their life and would be quickly caught out if they only did so for chess.

Could you explain how that works in practice? If for the sake of argument a currently male player with a high enough rating announced that they were becoming or wanted to become female and were thus eligible for the British Women's title what would the ECF expect to see by way of proof?

[Paul Cooksey]

Could you explain how that works in practice?

We are only really talking about the world championship. There would be enough press interest to expose a fraud.

FIDE made this law because it wanted to not because it had to.

[Chris Goodall]

The example of a male player simply transitioning to gain advantage is a straw man argument - that individual would need to transition in all areas of their life and would be quickly caught out if they only did so for chess.

Why would they need to transition in all areas of their life? Or to put it another way, what would be the consequences of being "caught out" - are you going to ask for their prize money back if they, like a trans woman I know, decide to stay in the closet with certain people and socially transition with others, while not going on hormones due to the expense?

If it still seems too hypothetical, how about the two non-binary chess players I know, can they enter a women's tournament if they're going through a female-presenting couple of months?

I know from painful experience that in discussions about trans stuff, when you hear the words "no-one is seriously suggesting...", you have two years before people will be seriously suggesting it. No-one was seriously suggesting that biological sex was a spectrum, until they were. No-one was seriously suggesting that we could dispense with the pre-transition psychiatric assessment for under-18s, until they were.

[Andrew Zigmond]

that individual would need to transition in all areas of their life and would be quickly caught out if they only did so for chess.

Could you explain how that works in practice? If for the sake of argument a currently male player with a high enough rating announced that they were becoming or wanted to become female and were thus eligible for the British Women's title what would the ECF expect to see by way of proof?

It is ultimately based on the good faith assumption that the male player has transitioned from male to female. And yes, it is possible to concoct a scenario where that is abused. However none of us live in a vacuum so (for example) if the player in question was still active on facebook with a male identity or remained male for their club/ league games then the deal would soon be up.

There is the wider question of who would actually bother? Nobody has done so yet.

[Andrew Zigmond]

Why would they need to transition in all areas of their life? Or to put it another way, what would be the consequences of being "caught out" - are you going to ask for their prize money back if they, like a trans woman I know, decide to stay in the closet with certain people and socially transition with others, while not going on hormones due to the expense?

This is the point. You can't legislate for every scenario that might occur - all you can do is use a common sense approach when it does. There might unfortunately be injustices on either side.

The brutal truth is that there is no obvious example of a transwoman in UK chess denying a biological woman a significant prize (in part because there are very few women's prizes or indeed significant prizes at any level). There is, however, a long list of genuine grievances chess players of all genders can claim and yet we seem incapable of taking any steps to sort those out.

[Tim Spanton]

Indeed as late as 1986 FIDE increased the ratings of all female players (except Susan Polgár) by 100 in an attempt to correct for the fact that no other women played in men's tournaments.

That was always just a political anti-Polgar decision.

A number of British women players of that era had gained international ratings as the minimum rating for women was 1900 against 2200 for men. Generally speaking they acquired their ratings in events such as Hastings, Lloyds Bank Masters and the British Championship, mostly against male opposition. So it was faulty logic that women's events were segregated.

As I understand it the floor for female players was 2000 (rather than 1900), and the argument was that this hurt women playing in all-female events as it brought average female ratings down. Susan Polgar (aka Polgár Zsuzsanna) was excluded from the 100-point bonus on the ground that she played in exclusively open tournaments and so had not been disadvantaged.