FIDE, the organisation that governs the international chess competition, announced this week that transgender women will effectively be banned from playing in women’s world chess events until further notice.
What unfair advantage a trans woman could have in this field is not explained in the updated handbook, which simply states players who transition “from a male to a female” have “no right” to play in official events until “further analysis”. At a glance, even the most fervent “women’s sports rights” campaigners haven’t been asking for this. How the hell did it come to this?
Crikey collects the accelerating panic around trans women in sport.
1976
In 1976, tennis player Renée Richards was outed as transgender by local TV anchor Richard Carlson, whose son Tucker has done so much to advance this conversation since. It caused a mini-storm: the US Tennis Association (USTA), the Women’s Tennis Association and the US Open Committee required all female competitors to verify their sex via the “Barr body test” of their chromosomes.
When Richards refused ahead of the 1976 US Open, the USTA refused to let her compete. Richards sued, claiming she was being discriminated against based on gender. The USTA’s defence was such perfect Cold War-era paranoia we’re amazed it didn’t form a subplot in Rocky IV:
Because of the millions of dollars of prizemoney available to competitors, because of nationalistic desires to excel in athletics, and because of worldwide experiments, especially in the Iron Curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago, the USTA has been especially sensitive to its obligation to assure fairness of competition among the athletes competing in the US Open.
Richards was backed by Billie Jean King, who argued in an affidavit: “[Richards] does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors in the sport of tennis.” Judge Alfred M Ascione found in Richards’ favour, ruling: “This person is now a female.”
She played, and was eliminated in the first round by Virginia Wade. She and Betty Ann Stuart made it to the doubles final, where they were beaten.
Upon her elimination at the hands of Wade (who noted later that she hadn’t found Richards’ serve as hard as she had expected), Richards downplayed the social significance of her appearance, telling The Washington Post: “There are no other transsexuals trying to play professional sports right now, and I would be surprised if there are more than five or six over the next 10 or 15 years. I doubt seriously that there was anything precedent-setting about this at all.”
For some time, that would prove to be true.
2008
South Africa’s Caster Semenya is not trans. She was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl and identifies as a woman. She has an intersex condition that gives her a testosterone level higher than the typical female range.
When she became the 800-metre world champion in 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) demanded she take a test affirming her gender. She has since been banned from competing in the races she’s best at by IAAF regulations demanding women with her condition take medication to suppress their testosterone levels. This lead to a debate around whether an athlete had to conform to broad ideas of womanhood to qualify as a woman.
“Certain bodies are never allowed to be female, are never allowed to be women, are never allowed to just be,” Pidgeon Pagonis, an intersex activist told Vox regarding the Semenya case in 2019.
2021
Transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand competed at the Tokyo Olympics. She failed to complete any of her first three lifts and was thus ruled out of medal contention in the women’s over-87 kilogram division.
Quinn, a non-binary and trans midfielder for the Canadian women’s football team, became the first openly trans athlete to win an Olympic medal when the team took gold. It passed without great controversy.
2022
A Republican Senate candidate in Missouri put out a campaign ad focused on Lia Thomas, a trans woman having success as a college-level swimmer. The ad said: “Women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women.” Thomas was made a lightning rod for the debate around trans women in sport.
Olympic silver medallist Erica Sullivan wrote in Newsweek: “Like anyone else in this sport, Lia has trained diligently to get to where she is and has followed all of the rules and guidelines put before her … She doesn’t win every time. And when she does, she deserves, like anyone else in this sport, to be celebrated for her hard-won success, not labelled a cheater simply because of her identity.”
In June, swimming regulator FINA voted to bar transgender women from the elite women’s competition if they had experienced any part of male puberty. International Rugby League implemented a ban in July.
The scientist informing FINA’s policy found transgender women maintained a performance advantage over female athletes if they underwent male puberty before transitioning, but as the ABC noted, it is unclear how it reached that conclusion.
2023
In March, the IAAF issued a ban on trans women competing against cis women. Cycling’s governing body did the same in July.
In June, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in the US passed a bill to force schools that receive federal money to place athletes on the team that matches their birth gender; 19 Republican-controlled states have implemented similar laws over recent years.
There as yet are no trans women competing at the highest level in track and field, or swimming.
University of Colorado Boulder Professor Roger Pielke Jr, a sports governance expert, called “a moral panic” over transgender athletes that was completely disproportionate to their numbers.
“We’re just shadow-boxing now,” Pielke told AP in 2022. “As if there’s not bigger issues sport could deal with.”
Why does chess, a cerebal, not physical sport have a gendered competition in the first place?
patriarchy
I understand that it is to encourage more women to play. As the game is dominated by men there is a women and a mixed league to provide a competitive competition for less talented players.
Sadly the patriarchy can’t be blamed for this one!
That’s exactly the patriarchy! Women didn’t play because they felt excluded. A female division increases participation which is better for both players and the game
That’s your claim. You know who also feels excluded – the gender nonconforming girls and women hounded out of women’s spaces because they are not sufficiently feminine.
Why does chess have gender specific tournaments is the first question.
Then we need to ask why any competition has gender specific events.
Then we get to why women have seperate events to men at all?
Let’s just have the open Olympics and watch men win every event.
It won’t matter then whether the women competing are trans or not. Men will win.
And everyone across the world will be happy.
Except women….. but really….. who cares ….. oh…… wait…..
Are you seriously claiming that men would beat women at chess because they are men?
“Transwomen” are men. End of.
So men are inherently superior to women at chess? That’s seriously what you’re going with?
My comment is not as one-sided as this one, yet it is ‘awaiting approval’. Why?
Rumour has it because the chess world is full of sexist ****holes so women-only comps are run to give them some peace and encourage other women & girls to play.
Well, there is a somewhat famous case where a woman won the mixed skeet shooting at the 1992 Olympics, after which women were banned from competing…
It is not immediately apparent why chess has sex-segregated categories. But any sport depending on strength, height, reach, power, endurance (i.e. pretty much all of them) should have such categories and the women’s category should be reserved for biological women: trans women can compete in the open category. It was completely outrageous that Laurel Hubbard was permitted to compete at the Olympics in weightlifting of all sports, not least because it deprived a young Pasifika woman of her place and what could have been a life-changing opportunity (Hubbard, incidentally, is the child of an Auckland billionaire). It is actually refreshing to see sporting bodies belatedly doing what they should have done years earlier and putting some restrictions in place. Quinn is a biological woman competing in women’s sport so hardly surprising there wasn’t any great controversy around her competing. And what’s the latest with Rundle? Any updates there?
If you want to have height categories, have height categories . Are you suggesting tall women be excluded from women’s sports?
No, because they’re women! What a weird and irrelevant thing to bring into the conversation.
You brought up height, not me.
Stick to your public toilet prowling and have your prostate checked.
Cis woman here. The public toilet prowling isn’t done by me, it’s the self appointed toilet police that don’t know women can have short hair.
Unlikely.
No woman would use the deliberately degrading term ‘cis’.
This is just silly. I don’t know personally many transwomen interested in sport at all. It’s one of our actual issues……getting any exercise at all. Let alone chess. How many elite trans chess players are there? One? None?
This whole thing is a solution in search of a problem.
Over it.
It’s actually the same problem for women and girls. Many give up sport, for a variety of reasons, which is detrimental to their skills in leadership and teamwork, long term health, self confidence and intelligence. Having to now play against males is one reason why women don’t play sport
If a trans male plays in a team results in just one women stopping playing, everyone loses.
Women’s chess? Who knew?
I didn’t. Why on earth is there a specific women’s tournament? Do men have some sort of physical advantage in lifting the pieces? It sounds so Monty Python that I’m having difficulty believing it.
It’s irrelevant why there is a female division. The fact that there is one is reason to protect the space from males.
The alternative could be to abolish the women’s division altogether but since it serves it’s intended purpose of increasing female participation, why would they?