Ban on Trans Women in Women’s Chess Opens Can of Male Chauvinist Worms
The International Chess Federation banned trans women from competing as women for… some… reason.
by Evan Urquhart
We never asked to live in a world where trans people’s existence was used to prop up age-old sexist beliefs about the inherent superiority of men, but here we are. In a controversial (one might even say boneheaded) move, the International Chess Federation announced new guidelines limiting the participation of transgender women in their tournaments. The new rules require proof of a change of gender in the form of document updates or legal procedings in the person’s home country. Trans women who provide such documents and are approved for a chess-official gender change would remain eligible for open tournaments, which includes most chess tournaments according to the Washington Post. However they would not be eligible for a smaller number of women-only tournaments (which are controversial in their own right).
Here’s an excerpt from the regulations:
screenshot from FIDE regulations
The regulations don’t give a rationale for why trans women wouldn’t be easily approved to play in women’s tournaments (or why transgender men’s past women’s titles would be abolished). The International Chess Federation (whose acronym is FIDE based on the French version of their name) thus far seems not to have commented or clarified for what their reasoning was. Chess, as all the stories about this feel the need to say, is not a game that demands any physical prowess. If the restrictions are based on the idea that trans women would have an unfair advantage against cis women, the advantage would be on strategy and intellect.
Whatever the intentions of the FIDE officials, there’s no avoiding the sexist implications here. Women are severely underrepresented in the highest levels of chess, but they’re severely underrepresented in the game as a whole, which is the usual explanation for why those differences in achievement exist. (People who prefer an alternative, biological explanaton don’t typically point to women’s overrepresentation in colleges as evidence for women’s superior intellect.)
Restricting trans women from women’s chess reinforces the message that cis women can never compete fairly with men. It’s very similar to bans on trans women in physical competition even after they have been on testosterone suppression for many years, which privilege the idea that being born male means an innate superiority over the data that suggest testosterone plays a key role in whatever physical advantages men have. (Read more on the nuance and fake-nuance in these conversations here.)
Many of the negative attitudes towards trans people are based on unthinking prejudice against people who are different, but when you scratch the surface a belief in the innate inferiority of women tends to be there as well. In chess it is even more clear how those attitudes encompass not just a narrow believe that testosterone has a role in muscle strength, or even a belief that the role testosterone plays in skeletal development during puberty could cause a continued advantage that is perhaps too small to have been directly measured in trans women athletes who’ve undegone testosterone suppression yet. It’s about a core belief that men are born to dominate and women to submit. It’s why the religious right loves transphobia, and why the areas of feminist thought that were sympathetic to trans exclusion have been so easily and thoroughly co-opted by the reactionary forces running roughshod over the cultural moment in which we find ourselves.