Retroactively stripping the titles from trans men (§4.1) does not "encourage female participation", no matter how you slice it.

> if a male competitor claims to have a woman identity, whatever that is

And I understand that from this perspective, the things you're saying might make internal sense; but if you were more familiar with the social pressures on trans people, you'd realise that they aren't well-modelled as cis members of their AGAB, for the purposes of inclusivity measures. Your perspective isn't a valid worldview.¹ This FIDE initiative makes no sense, if its intent is as stated.

> Why would you feel the need to rebut this?

For the same reason you felt the need to bring it up, I assume.

The arguments you've made to defend the FIDE decisions don't hold up, and you haven't explained why you believe the World Athletics decisions hold up, so there is nothing for me to rebut. Placing the burden of rebuttal on the opponent, when you make many comments in a short space of time, is known as the "Gish gallop": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop. If you want to enter something into discussion, you put in the work to do so. I'm not here to participate in no-rules debate club. (The main reason I'm engaging here is that I'm trying to practice de-escalation strategies.)

> Instead of considering it thoughtfully.

I have half a literature review devoted to this perspective. What I haven't done is written an essay with numerous citations in response to your one sentence and a link. Meanwhile, your "whatever that is" remark suggests you haven't thoughtfully considered the perspective of trans people before. So: you first. (If this is because you haven't had access to a trans person's perspective, let me know. I don't collect such articles, but I've probably got a link lying around somewhere.)

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¹: There are similar world-views which I strongly disagree with, but which nonetheless are valid, in the particular sense that I just called yours invalid. I sometimes learn things from talking to such people, so I make an effort to be friendly to them, even if they're not friendly to me.

> Retroactively stripping the titles from trans men (§4.1) does not "encourage female participation", no matter how you slice it.

Section 4.1 is the logical outcome of FIDE categories being split into Open, where both men and women can compete, and Women, where only women can compete. If a female player changes her chess-gender to man, then it no longer makes any sense for her to hold titles from the Women category such as Woman Grandmaster. She is choosing to exclude herself from a restricted category and the titles that only exist in that category.

I actually don't agree with this policy overall but given that they've decided to let men register as women and women register as men, I'm glad they at least included some restrictions in Section 3 to prevent the men from competing in the Women's category.

> if you were more familiar with the social pressures on trans people, you'd realise that they aren't well-modelled as cis members of their AGAB, for the purposes of inclusivity measures. Your perspective isn't a valid worldview.

I think we just have different worldviews.

This article by Susan Polgar, a trailblazer in women's chess and who has been a role model for female chess players worldwide, makes the case for why separate tournaments for women and girls are needed: https://web.archive.org/web/20250306124806/https://chessdail...

She describes the challenges she faced as a young girl and then as a woman in this male-dominated field, how she had to deal with sexism, social stigma, unwanted sexual advances and threats to her physical safety - all because she is female and wanted to play chess.

With that in mind, the question is, how would including male players (who call themselves women) in these tournaments benefit women and girls? I don't see how it would. The ask seems to be driven from these males requesting to be included, rather than female players requesting these males' inclusion.

> you haven't explained why you believe the World Athletics decisions hold up

I've read their policy and from my understanding the restrictions they've put onto eligibility in the female competition are both evidence-based and prioritise fairness for female athletes (rather than inclusion of male athletes). That's why I personally welcome them.

It's actually quite nuanced when you look at the details, for example, athletes with CAIS are eligible even though from a strictly technical perspective they are 46,XY males. The reason they are eligible is because, being entirely sensitive to androgens, their bodies developed an external female phenotype with no testosterone-driven advantage over 46,XX female athletes.

Whereas the policy excludes male athletes who have DSDs like 5-ARD, even if they have female documentation (e.g. Caster Semenya), because of the male physiological advantage and how unfair this is to female competitors.

> Meanwhile, your "whatever that is" remark suggests you haven't thoughtfully considered the perspective of trans people before.

I have actually, in many discussions with trans-identitied people both in real life and online, in reading articles and books, and in reading forums where they talk to each other. It's mostly why I ended up rejecting the idea that woman and man are merely identities to be claimed. Personally I find that notion quite sexist.