The Trans Sports Panic Has Reached Peak Stupidity

All bans on transgender people’s participation in professional sports are ridiculous, but some are so ridiculous that they leave you speechless. This week saw the introduction of just such a ban—one that should baffle pretty much anyone. That’s because it concerns perhaps the last sport anyone should have expected to make such a move—in the process, laying bare the real motivation behind these bans, since they never were actually about fair competition.

That sport: Chess. (Really? Yes, really.) As of this week, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) has instituted a new policy about trans chess players. To say that it defies the stereotype of chess enthusiasts as intelligent people is putting it mildly.

Under the new policy, trans women are banned by default from competing in women-only chess tournaments. (There are no bans for all-gender events.) To get around this ban, players must provide documentation that any changes to their gender meet all the requirements of their local government. Even then, FIDE says, “further analysis” would be needed until a trans woman gets the green light to play—a vague process that FIDE says could take up to two years. In addition, any trans men who won women’s titles before their transition will have those titles taken away, while trans women retain theirs. As with most of these policies, nonbinary players are not addressed.

Chess now joins cycling, track and field, swimming, and rugby, among other sports, in instituting bans on transgender women’s participation at the elite international level. But while other bans have relied on arguments about physical advantages that may be held by transgender women—despite no scientific evidence to support this, as well as the International Olympic Committee’s issuing new guidelines urging international federations to move away from these exclusionary policies—the chess ban clearly implies that trans women might have an intellectual advantage over cisgender women.

FIDE’s attempts to dispute this are feeble at best. “Of course men and women are equally intellectually capable,” FIDE told The Washington Post. “However, in chess as a sport other factors like physical endurance may play a role.” (In other words, women are as smart as men, but perhaps not as good at sitting in a chair for a while and thinking about where a little horse should go on a board. How empowering.)

FIDE’s new policy—and its pathetic attempts to defend that policy— underscores two things about the trans-exclusionary wave that is sweeping all levels of sport. The first is that these rules are based not on science but on misogyny. Whatever FIDE says, there is no reason to ban trans women from competing against cis women in a chess competition unless you believe that men (because people who discriminate against trans women see them as “biological men” and believe a person’s sex to be an immutable binary) are smarter than women—or that there is something so inherently vile about trans people that cis people must be protected from them even while playing a board game. The bans in more physical sports rely on this same belief: that someone who was designated as male at birth will always beat in athletic competition someone who was designated as female at birth. Not only is this demonstrably false, it relies on a blatantly sexist and bigoted worldview.

This argument is even more surreal when you consider that many of the trans-exclusionary organizations that support these bans under the guise of “protecting” women’s sports or standing up for women’s right to “fair” competition are run by women. They are essentially arguing that their idea of feminism is one in which men are smarter and physically superior to them, which seems, at a minimum, contradictory to the very tenets of the movement. (Hilariously, trans women were also recently banned from the Miss Italy beauty competition, so trans women are also apparently prettier than cis women—add it to the list of things trans women excel at.)

“FIDE’s transgender policy is ridiculous and dangerous,” grandmaster and two-time US champion Jennifer Shahade said in a statement to Chess.com. “It’s obvious they didn’t consult with any transgender players in constructing it. It’s also sinister timing that this comes out just as chess is finally reckoning with sexual assault and harassment in chess highlighting the links between misogyny and transphobia.”

Shahade makes an important point. Earlier this year, eight women, including Shahade, brought sexual harassment and assault allegations against grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez. In August, 14 prominent women chess players in France wrote an open letter calling out the systemic sexism and sexual violence that has impacted generations of women trying to break into the sport. It seems that FIDE has decided to use trans people as a distraction from the actual problem facing the sport—swapping one type of misogyny for another and making trans players the villains, rather than focusing on the men who govern and control the sport.