finally, my time has come

Social democrats are the moderate wing; Bog-standard liberals are just normal fascists.

Chess has the dubious honor of housing some of the most spirited debate about gender segregation in sports. Women are allowed in the conventional tournaments, right? They’re either opens or invitationals. There were sparingly few women, however. They were made to feel unsafe in chess clubs and tournaments. People who develop poor interpersonal skills will take their frustrations out on them and then women to this day get DMs from their opponents (even when they are underage girls in the presence of their parents).

So they began hosting women only tournaments. They created women’s master titles - WGM (woman grandmaster) and the like. They have a lower requirement correlated with the lower turnout of women and so they don’t need to go compete in the open tournaments to hit their norms (beat a standing title holder to qualify for the title). You can almost call it a marketing effort more than it is the way things are ™. Well, use your imagination to determine what people have to say about it. Women aren’t as smart as men so they need their own chess tournaments. Why are men disproportionately represented in chess grandmasters? Women need chess tournaments to be woke or whatever.

But if that were it, then it wouldn’t be so hotly debated. You’d have an FAQ on the FIDE website and call it a day. You also have the reasonable arguments from women who hold the titles or otherwise participate in the ecosystem. Alex Botez had a video discussing it with her friends and said something to the effect of being embarrassed of her woman master title because she believed it encouraged women to be mediocre and not shoot for the real master’s titles. Then the counterargument is that without these titles and tournaments you’re not going to have as many women in the opens. You could feed a women’s chess club into a regular chess club. Women are empowered, perhaps not to the top, but through the beginning. But then you ask are they placated and made to feel less ambitious because they have these environments. So this makes for an interesting perspective.

In that context, trans women would benefit tremendously from the protection of a women’s tournament in very similar ways to cis women. Even some sort of “what if she makes it weird” argument falls flat because any woman there is capable of making it weird. The trans woman is not uniquely equipped to cause drama. A trans woman who would otherwise be excluded from the sport would find a safe space where the introduction to chess is more likely to be LGBT friendly and progressive, she feeds into a normal chess club with a couple bona fides, and she feels more capable of navigating an open tournament. At least that’s one school of thought. And the other school of thought is cynical to the idea not because she’s trans, but because she’ll be complacent in an open tournament and perpetuate stereotypes of being a woman.

Even a trans woman stomping a women’s tournament enters into that fierce and ongoing argument with the reasonable backing of other women successful in the sport arguing that there’s no reason to feel limited by being women and that superior chess can speak for itself. They should instead attempt to argue with each other as candidates for the chess world championship.

Obviously society would never produce structures to reinforce patriarchal views on sex and gender. That would be absurd. Women are clearly more emotional and thus shouldn’t be able to vote, the law says so! /s

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7846503/
• https://www.transresearch.org.au/post/trans-women-in-sport
• https://theconversation.com/do-trans-women-have-an-advantage-in-sport-the-genetics-of-sex-are-complex-279647

From my crossread of the literature, advantages in endurance sports pretty much completely evaporate over 1-2 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy (most importantly lowering testosterone). Advantages based on explosive strength, especially of the upper body, last a bit longer, and advantages conferred by denser or longer bones (such as height) tend to last even longer. After about 1 year on hormone therapy for endurance and ~2 years for strength, the physical advantages of having gone through male puperty are not completely gone, but they tend to be smaller than the natural variation between cis women.

“I’m as far left as they come and my friend is 20x more left than I am, and even she says the races should be kept separate and the lower castes are not meant to be literate.”

• Average Fedditor

They Sig Heil with their left hand

I saw world banned someone for an unconfirmed screenshot dm message, while people and comments in the same thread attacking people were either left up or given multiple warnings.

Get so much leeway when attacking those they are okay with being attacked

I looked at the rest of the thread and it boggles my mind that those horrific comments were just allowed to stay up. Are we federated with that instance, just curious?

I am a machine woman, it is insulting to be called biological

They’re going down the well you can’t let certain people into women’s sports because they would have genetic advantages path now. I don’t think they’ll like being asked does that mean we need to remove that for all sports (the genetic advantages) like height

Fed is right in the name!

If only it was isolated to those users

This is like a Chapo bit. I’m a Pelosi supporter, so trust me when I say that my opinion is literally the furthest most left-wing opinion there is: all budget items apart from police and the military should be budget neutral.

Would’ve voted for Pete Buttigieg twice.

Weird how it looks like all the ones also saying it’s fine to ban only certain treatments from the rare/lucky ones on federal Healthcare