The kingdom of 64 squares could lose its Latin there. Ignoring the scientific, artistic and playful aspects of the game of chess, the Fide (International Chess Federation) – created by the Frenchman Pierre Vincent in 1924 in Paris – has just taken the decision to ban transgender players, that is- that is, male players who have become female, to participate in women’s tournaments. This two-year regulation came into force on August 21, 2023.
Chaired since 2018 by the Russian Arkadi Dvorkovitch, Fide, behaving solely as an essentially “sporting” body, has in fact aligned itself with the decision of Fina (International Swimming Federation) which, on June 20, 2022, prohibited male-to-female transgender competitors to no longer compete in female-only competitions. If this policy can be understood for disciplines where size and physical strength are preponderant, this -temporary- position taken by Fide is surprising because it concerns “athletes of the mind” where only combinatorial and strategic aptitudes count. stake.
It is worth remembering that in chess today there are only two categories of tournament, -in addition to the age categories which go from chick to veteran-, mixed and female. If men have long dominated major tournaments, since the 1930s with the exploits of Vera Menchik and more recently those of the prodigious Hungarian Judit Polgar and the Chinese Hou Yifan, we know that chess talent is not the prerogative of a kind.
Today, by engulfing itself in this problem, Fide is not only slavishly following the decision of sports federations which submit themselves to “athletic” selection criteria. Unfortunately, it also obscures the simply entertaining character of the king of games which, it is worth remembering, is played regularly, out of competition, by some 500 million players on five continents. It was these 64 squares aficionados who watched with great pleasure the series Le jeu de la Dame, which narrated the exploits of champion Beth Harmon. A fiction, finally very realistic, which will have done much more for the development of chess than a decision of restriction for the least debatable.
The very active Yosha Iglesias, chess master, composer of studies and coach especially on YouTube, where her lessons are particularly appreciated, reacted on Twitter by expressing her fears in front of the decision of Fide which she considers discriminatory: “Can anyone tell me what is considered an official Fide event? Will I be allowed to play the French Championship in 3 days? The European Club Cup in September?
There is in the history of the game, so far, only one transgender high-level swordswoman who has won a national level competition for women only. Her name is Annemarie Sylvia Meier and she became German women’s champion in 2003 at the age of 46. A performance that, for now, remains unique. This new policy does not apply to transgender men competing in the male categories. The Fide press release, however, specifies that transgender men will be stripped of all the titles they would have obtained in the female category before their transition. And that they could recover them only if they prove that they became a woman again and that they still have the license which holds the original title. Many questions remain unanswered, which Ana Valens asks in her article: “What is the point of this measure? Are transgender women naturally better at chess? Are we too smart to mess with cis women?”
