The world’s top chess federation has ruled that transgender women cannot compete in its official events for females until an assessment of gender change is made by its officials.

  • bhmnscmm@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t really follow. Do you mean only non/minimally physical competitions or all competitive sports/games/activities?

    For things like chess, fishing, and spelling bees gender segregation doesn’t make sense. But for things like martial arts or weight lifting I think it makes sense.

    It at least makes sense if the goal is competition between roughly similar groups of participants, and not just a single open class dominated by a particular physiology.

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Why not set up divisions, among sports where the physiological differences do matter, based on the actual weight, strength etc of the individual participants, whatever traits are relevant to that sport, rather than by gender? Even if the average woman and the average man have, say, a strength difference, there are still going to be some women who are evenly matched with some subset of men, after all. I feel like such a system, if done well, could make things more competitive than simply sorting by gender, because it enables sports where the people who are not on the stronger end of what their gender is capable of to still face equivalent opponents, and would remove the whole reason for debate regarding trans athletes, because they could get put into the same categories as anyone else without their identity being invalidated or having any relevance to their performance.

      • _wintermute@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        arrow-down
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        There are tons of ways to makes sports more inclusive. The issue has never been “we’re all out of ideas,” but rather “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” Also “tRaDiTiOn”