The international chess federation known as FIDE has published new rules that state that a person whose “gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made”.

The new rules introduce the following changes:

  • Trans women cannot participate in the women’s category unless they are explicitly allowed in a case-by-case process that can take up to two years.
  • Trans men will be stripped of their titles achieved before their transition while trans women will retain their titles achieved before their transition.
  • In case a trans person is allowed to participate, their trans condition will be added to their files and communicated to events organizers.
  • frog 🐸@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    It seems like the issue is that the Womens and Open titles aren’t directly equivalent in terms of their requirements, then? Since it would be unfair to give a higher title when the person hasn’t earned it, and there’s no title with the same requirements, then the nearest equivalent title would seem the only option.

    I also suspect that the likelihood of someone being trans and having an extremely high title is quite low, and for the majority of trans chess players, the transfer would be between lower ranked titles, and when they are not as well-known, which means it would be both more viable and more important for their privacy to be respected. That said, I do agree with you that it should be down to the trans person to choose what they want to happen with the titles they’ve earned. I just thought it was worth pointing out that transferring trans men’s Womens titles to the nearest equivalent Open title is a good policy, even if it was implemented unintentionally.