this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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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?
I haven't, because those numbers themselves can't prove that.
What they can tell you is that any individual woman playing chess at high levels is vastly outnumbered by men. All things being equal, that also makes women much less likely to win tournament titles (or even qualify for tournaments), if no titles or tournaments do anything to compensate. The result would be that women are likely to become invisible whenever you watch any sort of 'high level' chess – and that can have consequences reinforcing the underlying issue.
The commenter I replied to theorised that the underlying motivation for having 'gender segregated' (which in reality equates to female-exclusive) titles was a fear of women winning. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. That's what my argument adresses – not the trans issue.
I suppose you never personally adopted that position but it is at the heart of the debate in this thread and deserves acknowledgement.
The argument with chess is not "trans women have an advantage at chess" the argument is still pure transphobia of "trans women are not women."
To be clear I don't agree with that, I just wanna get us back on track because it's different from the discussion around other sports.
“Being a woman is no excuse for failure.”