The international chess federation known as FIDE has published new rules that state that a person whose “gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made”.
The new rules introduce the following changes:
- Trans women cannot participate in the women’s category unless they are explicitly allowed in a case-by-case process that can take up to two years.
- Trans men will be stripped of their titles achieved before their transition while trans women will retain their titles achieved before their transition.
- In case a trans person is allowed to participate, their trans condition will be added to their files and communicated to events organizers.
If trans mens’ titles are converted to general titles of equal level (which the policy does allow for - it does say “same or lower level”), it would actually be a really good policy, as it would prevent trans men being outed by having “Womens…” titles. But given the rest of the changes are blatantly transphobic, it doesn’t seem that respecting the privacy of trans men was the goal.
Yes the policy “allows” for that, but the decision solely lies with FIDE. And the examples they give are of deranking. What they mean by that is not Changing Womens Grandmaster into a general Grandmaster. The requirements for a GM are higher. You need 2500 ELO and perform three “norms” of 2600 performance rating. Essentially have high ELO and show against other GMs your skill. For a WGM you need an ELO of 2300 and three “norms” of 2400 performance rating.
Since a WGM doesn’t meet the GM requirements (otherwise they would be a GM) they can’t get that title. But now they’re stripped of their WGM title as well and placed in rank of FIDE master, which requires “only” an ELO of 2300, and no norms. As such it is lower than WGM.
A player at that level is already well connected and known in the community. They wouldn’t be able to keep their transition secret, what with the rumour mill going around. Plus the decision of whether they want to “derank”, giving up their earned title for a lower but more gender-affirming one, should ultimately lie with the person and not with the body that already bestowed that title on them.
It seems like the issue is that the Womens and Open titles aren’t directly equivalent in terms of their requirements, then? Since it would be unfair to give a higher title when the person hasn’t earned it, and there’s no title with the same requirements, then the nearest equivalent title would seem the only option.
I also suspect that the likelihood of someone being trans and having an extremely high title is quite low, and for the majority of trans chess players, the transfer would be between lower ranked titles, and when they are not as well-known, which means it would be both more viable and more important for their privacy to be respected. That said, I do agree with you that it should be down to the trans person to choose what they want to happen with the titles they’ve earned. I just thought it was worth pointing out that transferring trans men’s Womens titles to the nearest equivalent Open title is a good policy, even if it was implemented unintentionally.