Silly question, why does chess, a mental activity, need gendered leagues?
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Chess at pro level is brutal. One can get mentally mauled if the adversary has a superior, trained for cruel psychological warfare, mind.
Men just don't stand a chance.
Being a minority in any social setting brings difficulties that others just don't otherwise face.
Having a women's category for chess is a way of creating a safe environment for everyone to thrive.
Minorities like trans people? A place where everyone can thrive?
It's fucking chess. I understand men may have more typical interest, but there shouldn't be divisions based on sex or gender. Maybe divisions for some neurodivergent people, but I'd bet on many of the great chess players being neurodivergent in some way.
Only counter argument I can give you is have a bit of empathy.
Imagine that you were a young girl and saw this game. Chess. And you wanted to learn how to play.
The first person you asked was your mother and she told you oh that's a boys game. But you still wanted to learn.
So you decide to just read up on the rules. You don't really know anyone that plays. So you just kinda play vs yourself and redo. Old GM matches you found in old magazines. None of them are like you btw. They all seem like old men that live on the opposite side of the world.
You really like the game tho. And eventually you realize oh. There are actual clubs/tourneys near here I can go and play with actual people!
You go. And there's not a single girl there. Because of all the hurdles you had to jump. Most others that would have been interested just quit.
So you get there. You are obviously underprepared because you didn't have the support system that made learning it easy. Because of that you just get wrecked.
In addition to that you probably will have to hear some dumb jokes. That if you didn't have such a rough patch to get there in the first place they might have been funny to you. But they aren't. They just felt like you were being punched down.
Having exclusive tournaments and leagues is a very minor way of rectifying awful historical disparities. It's not perfect and it's not a solution by itself. But it's absolutely needed.
If you are going to chess tournaments, you are past the point of getting your ass kicked in chess club. I said it on another thread, but if people are being demeaning and unsportsmanlike, they can get kicked out just as you would any other game. They do it for MTG, YGO and Pokemon TCG tournaments. Bullshittery about trans people aside, this is more of a systemic issue than anything else.
If the gender ratio was something like 1:4 or less, you'd have an argument that everyone should just get along. But there's like 16 times more men in chess than women and separate tournaments means the gals won't have to learn chest thumping to deal with the asshole faction they can simply be catty which they already know how to do.
What the fuck is this sexist shit? Women are inharently catty and men are inharently aggressive?
If there's an issue with men being aggressive, there needs to be rules to prevent it. If the ratio is a problem, there needs to be tools created to address that. The solution isn't "women are catty and sensitive, so they need to be seperate."
My apologies. I still don't understand. Are you suggesting that women are too fragile to deal with men's posturing, or what? It's fucking chess. Unless someone is arguing there are blatant skill discrepancies between men an women, it still doesn't makes sense why there are divided tournaments. Is the argument women are less strategically minded, or what?
What? Is this real? Are the men and women not competing together? It is not a physical competition. Why the separation?
Currently, the top women don't come close to the top men. Considering how few female chess players are in comparison, it's not a surprise.
Having a women's league means you can have chess news about women's tournaments and champs and give them some visibility.
Currently, the top women don’t come close to the top men
because they're excluded at all levels, lets not pretend it's because women aren't as good and need "protecting" from the "superior" men.
That doesn't make any sense.
Yes, they don't compete with men, but they still have women's league and women from that league don't come close to men (not all, ofcourse).
Could making united league deter women even more? Very possible.
I am not against, but still I think a strong bump in women's chess league with marketing, money, better condition would be great, before possible merging.
Currently, women would just suffer with results for long time.
Unfortunately Chess doesn't seem as healthy and open for that, and that is just sad.
I feel like if you really wanted to know you could easily look up the barriers that women face in chess (and in all sports), and I honestly don't feel like spoon feeding you such basics, so I'm going to just paste my other reply here and leave it up to you to start educating yourself if you really want to:
The solution to men harassing women (and generally making them unwelcome, as they do) should not be to segregate women though, it should be to discipline men.
Which leads me to the real reason why women are segregated (because clearly isn't about their safety or their inclusion) - because the men involved would have an absolute breakdown if they were beaten by a woman (not a problem exclusive to chess, either).
Ugh, why do they feel the need to even write these rules in the first place? I can almost guarantee you there's like, five trans people who are even registered to play chess. Why go to so much effort to block such a fraction of a percent of people anyways?
Whenever I read articles like these, I substitute "trans" for a different minority, such as a racial or ethnic minority, and it really puts it in perspective.
I remember when Utah made a huge deal about it in women's sports. And someone like the Utah governor was against it, saying he'd never seen so much hate around something so little. He told his colleagues that in the entire state, only four trans youth were even playing registered sports, and most were JV, not even going to competitions. It's sad to see people so stoked by hate for something so...mundane. :/
Because Amy Scnider now owns all the women's jeopardy records?
Take what you want from that, I don't really have an opinion on trans people in pure intellectual competitions.
And they also made it so trans men have to give up any women's titles they've earned. So, they simultaneously think trans men are men, but trans women are not women.
If anything, based on the past comments of the head of the organization, they have a position that's generally "women are dumber than men and we want to make decisions that align with that ethos always".