I find it bizarre that it's 2023 and not only is chess still gender-segregated but they're doubling down on it. It makes sense for physical sports, but chess? Really?
Y'all just scared the girls are gonna wipe the board with you.
I can't imagine you've seen the numbers. Currently the number of fide grand masters totals 1772 men and 41 women. At the rank below, international masters, the numbers are 3893 men and 134 women.
If you were to simply remove titles exclusive to women tomorrow, you would be barring many more women from ever being able to call themselves 'champion'. How do you imagine that would impact young girls' willingness to dedicate themselves to the game?
Remember that even if men are at an advantage for strictly cultural reasons (being more encouraged to play the game) that still means they have an advantage.
You may have proven that men have an advantage in the average case due to inherent misogyny but that doesn't prove that any one particular trans woman has any sort of advantage over the field of cis women. Where is this army of mtf chess players storming the women's ranks? Why do we have to solve every problem the majority can think of before we're allowed to solve problems minorities are actually living through?
Even that I don't get.
Why not just make a bunch of leagues to separate people by skill, and let everyone play in whatever league they fit in skill whise regardless of gender.
That completely eliminates the problem with trans womens "unfair advantage" when playing in the womens league too.
Because then there wouldn't be women competing in the top leagues of many sports. Men have a huge physical advantage. On marathons, for instance, there's a >10 minute gap. And people cannot watch each of these separate leagues, they usually want to watch the best in any sports class. It also wouldn't motivate women to play amateur sports if they get completely destroyed by most men.
The current sex-based split is imo still the fairest, though it does indeed cause some issues. The naming might not be ideal. The male class is basically the "open" class. Anyone can compete in it whenever they want. The women's class exists solely to give people who have not recently been under the influence of testosterone and other male hormones a chance to compete with other people with their body type. That's not only women, but should also allow for AFAB non-binary and trans guys as long as they haven't started T.
Why not make leagues separated by performance only? Because when talented women work hard to excel at a sport, they deserve recognition for that beyond merely being allowed to compete with people who have testosterone increasing their physical abilities.
I compete in Taekwon-Do tournaments, and I train others to compete. I have a really badass young woman who trains really hard, and on top of it all she's extremely talented. If she keeps it up, after a few years she could be up there with the best in the world... among women. ALSO she literally won the [redacted because I realized someone could find her name lol, it's a small sport with few seriously competitive people] women's world championship for the US, just as a side project. That girl cannot compete with men at a high level. I'm still leagues below the guys who go to the world championships, never mind win them. I would blow her and her competition out of the water if you made me seriously compete with them. She deserves an environment where she can compete with people at the same weight class and born with a similar enough body, and when she wins she deserves to be called the best. Not "congratulations, you're good enough to spar with the lower end of the guys."
I've been kinda following this on and off, and the funniest thing to me is that iirc, most female chess masters are like, "we'll play against trans girls if they wanna play us. We'll even play against trans boys too!"
It's the Men who are like, "nuuuuhhhh.... muh.... muh womens"
That's basically it afaik. Chess has been around long enough that it was originally man's game, then they started letting women compete but only against other women. The reason why I don't think there's been a significant challenge to it is that with physical competitions often being segregated, I don't think anyone really stopped and thought about the fact that the segregation is pointless. I think they were just like, "competitions are usually segregated by gender, makes sense for chess to be segregated" without stopping to think about why competitions are usually segregated.
However, I'm not a huge chess person. I liked it as a kid but it doesn't even remotely appeal to me anymore. So my info might be wrong, and if there are any chess historians who want to correct me, go for it!
"We have to make sure that cis women don't play against anyone other than cis women, because we're pretty sure cis women aren't as good at chess as anyone else"
we're just trying to address the way that cis women are disadvantaged in chess due to centuries of misogyny in the sport. We're not anti trans, we just can't have cis men pretending to be trans in order to further themselves in competition.
Okay, not a fan of how you're going about it but I can understand your goals at least
We'll be stripping titles from trans men who competed as women and then came out later
Ah, there it is. You never have to look too far into efforts to "protect women" to see where it's really just about hurting trans people because you can.
Why is the chess assotioation such big abbies anyway? That's just pretty f*cking stupid. Yu-Gi-Oh on the other hand, despite being a card game partially meant for kids, are way more mature than a sport considereded "proffesional"