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.
They seem to be applying the correct gender retroactively, with a key difference being that there’s a women’s protected category and an open category. Women, cis or trans, can play in the open category so change in gender status for someone who competed as if they were a man (and thus necessarily in the open category) is irrelevant to the titles.
At present I’m inclined to disagree with this apparent retroactive application so I’m not defending this, just explaining my understanding of their thinking. It’s about open and protected categories. If it was men’s only and women’s only, it would be different.
One point in defence of retroactively changing titles for trans men: the documentation specifies that women’s titles can be transferred to an open title of the same or lower level, which effectively protects trans men’s privacy by not leaving them with women’s titles that would otherwise out them. I’m not sure it was intentional, or just a side effect, but it’s actually a good policy for trans men.
Thanks, that makes sense. (I’m not agreeing with them either).
Ah. Thanks for explaining. In their twisted world that sort of makes sense.