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.
With these new rules, FIDE has managed to
Imply the mental inferiority of women
Validate the existence of transgender men
Destroy the integrity of awards record-keeping
Call transgender women men
Very nice, FIDE, incredible mental gymnastics performance! 👏 Add them to the ever lengthening sports federation shitlist.
What a weird way to go about it. Knowing a small amount about chess ratings the loss or changing of title does in some ways make sense though in the way that the bar for a woman to be considered GM is lower than a man. So effectively you would have a title that may have a rating requirement higher than your pre-transition rating. I get that part…. But the rest?
These are weird rules that really don’t need to be there and I hope too GMs speak out against this in both the male and female sections. There has been quite a bit of drama in the chess community in recent years over what is essentially gender discrimination. So another stain on chess with this one.
Editing to add: the differing rating requirements in an intellectual game are very strange to begin with. There are many women who meet the requirements of being a GM(male) rather than a WGM and they’re a significantly smaller portion of the overall chess players