Chess is male-dominated from childhood onwards, and the women who do play are highly outnumbered by men. So women-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to try to redress the balance by encouraging women and girls to play.
How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.
Women's chess is a protected category. On that basis, FIDE are stating that women who don't want to be women can opt out of that category if they so wish, but men who say they are women cannot opt into it.
I don't think that is correct. What FIDE is doing is taking away titles earned by people who are now trans men that they earned when they played as women.
In international chess there generally aren't any men's competitions. There are competitions that are restricted to women and competitions that have no sex or gender restriction.
> For women, I've found that they see men as biologically and intrinsically dangerous, and that a tiger doesn't change its stripes just because they are alienated from masculinity.
This is demonstrably true in many scenarios. Such as, males being transferred to women's prisons because they say they are women. As a consequence, female prisoners have been sexually assaulted and raped by these men. Drawing attention to this isn't misandry, it's reality.
So...there's a funny little consequence of putting in the work to have those real-life conversations, and that's that one starts to be able to see "past" post-hoc justifications like yours.
Trying to argue the "facts" with anonymous internet denizens is pretty much useless, because especially in today's post-truth landscape, you can find justification for any horrendous opinion if you dig deep enough. That is even assuming the person you're talking to is even real and not an AI, a bored sociopath on an alt account, a paid shill or otherwise.
Thankfully, spaces like these are very much not representative of real life, where most individuals are nice, decent people minding their own business, and "saving face" isn't seen as such an imperative away from the public scrutiny of the internet.
In the real-life conversations I've had about this issue, most people are horrified when they find out that men, transferred to women's prisons due to trans activist policy, have been sexually assaulting and raping female inmates. Keeping in mind that this isn't a hypothetical about what might happen but is a direct result of harmful policy, and involves documented cases and real victims.
It tends to prompt a rethink about this whole topic.
The Supreme Court ruling will also ensure that males are not present in women's prisons, women's hospital wards, women's sports, domestic violence refuges for women, and many other spaces designated as being single-sex.
It also confirms that, in law, sexual orientation is defined in terms of sex. One of the intervenors in the case included lesbian groups who were concerned that legal recognition of the rights of lesbian women would be rendered meaningless if heterosexual males could simply identify as such.
As for bathrooms, they are one of the few facilities for which access is based on trust. The activists who insist that they're going to use opposite-sex bathrooms regardless of what the law says are confirming that they can't be trusted to respect boundaries and stay out. Which says a lot really.
I'm merely following the logic of your argument, that people who violate rules demonstrate untrustworthiness and a lack of respect for boundaries; you did not specify an exception for those people whose civil rights are being infringed by those rules.
Are you saying that it's fair to extend such an exception?
More importantly though, it's a great day for women who need single-sex spaces. This is a much-needed clarification of the law.
The Supreme Court judgment makes this very clear: if you're male, having a Gender Recognition Certificate doesn't make it okay for you to be in a female-only space. And those without a certificate shouldn't be there either. Service providers who insist otherwise can be held legally liable.
Could you explain the racial analogy in more detail please? It's not obvious how restricting males from using female-only spaces is similar in concept or principle to racial segregation.
While these sub-ideologies did exist, they were fringe. This is now a primary issue for conservatives and it has been brought into the zeitgeist and their political platforms. That is different. Most, close to all, conservatives were not considering this in the late 70s. I know you know that.
Not as fringe as you may believe. Raymond's book sold a lot of copies. But more impactfully, radical feminist ideas on this topic and others continued to develop, and became increasingly influential from then to now.
One aspect of this that often isn't considered is how women with shared feminist ideals but differing political backgrounds have been working together across the aisle. As a result, radical feminists on the left have had significant influence on conservative policymakers via these informal collaborations. Look at EO 14168 for example.
Apologies, but I really do not care about sports awards or whatever - we're basically at the point in the USA that we're trying (or succeeding) to force de-transitioning because of bullshit like "He took her awards!"
When there's an impact that individual bad actors have, that's why we have individual punishments - we don't punish all men or all women for one bad actor, its nonsensical to treat trans folks as some homogeneous group when they literally embody the opposite :]
In the case of prison policy, keeping prisoners strictly separated by sex, with no transfers of male prisoners into women's prisons allowed, under any circumstances.
Prisons should of course have safeguarding policy for further separation of vulnerable inmates within the prison.
> He teamed up with Lorena Borjas, the unofficial den mother to transgender Latinx women in New York City, to start the bail fund for transgender immigrants, and he joined a working group of lawyers who were drafting recommendations for President Obama's Department of Justice on the incarceration of trans people. "We asked people in prison what they needed, and they all said that they wanted a trans unit," Strangio said. But the lawyers in the working group, including Strangio, believed that L.G.B.T. units were stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.
However they were ignored, and instead of this, a policy of transferring males to women's prisons was introduced.
Do you think the status quo of American prisons is good for anyone? I agree that this issue could be handled better, but as a non-American I've been horrified by many more things in the American prison system than this.
Placing female prisoners at risk of physical violence, sexual assault, rape and impregnation by male prisoners is an obvious wrong to undo, but I agree there are many other horrifying aspects of prison conditions that need to be addressed as well.
Often enough to demonstrate that incarcerating males in women's prisons on the basis of self-declared "gender identity" is harmful policy that needs to be removed and cancelled everywhere it's been implemented.
It's worth keeping in mind that the reason we have sex-segregated prisons in the first place is because mixed-sex prisons were so demonstrably harmful to female inmates, who were subjected to physical violence, sexual assault, rape, impregnation by male prisoners.
> In any case, segregation of men and women in sports is a relatively new thing in history, dating back to around 1920-ish when the first bans for women appeared under the guise of "protecting their health / modesty". Plain and simple, men were afraid that women were just as competitive as they were, most sports are skill sports and not brute-strength sports.
You are confusing two separate things here: access to competitive sports, and having a separate female category in competitive sports. The former was denied to women for the same reasons that women were denied access to many aspects of society that men could freely enjoy. Whereas the latter - eliminating male physical advantage from competition - is necessary for fairness and, in the case of contact sports, for safety.
> Where does one want to draw the line?
Evidence-based policy approaches typically draw the line at the male physical advantage of testosterone-driven development.
So for example a male athlete with CAIS (complete insensitivity to androgens) may be permitted to compete in the women's category because testosterone was entirely ineffective from development in utereo onwards.
Whereas a male athlete with 5-ARD (impaired conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone) won't be, as the phenotype of micropenis and less facial hair doesn't eliminate the male physical advantage in sport.
> It's worth keeping in mind that the reason we have sex-segregated prisons in the first place is because mixed-sex prisons were so demonstrably harmful to female inmates, who were subjected to physical violence, sexual assault, rape, impregnation by male prisoners.
The problem then are male prisoners, are they not? In fact, trans women are 13 times more likely to be assaulted in prison [1] than cis-male ones.
The solution is obvious - more guards in prison, segregate prisoners with a violence or sexual assault history, and maybe imprison less people in the first place because many prisons are plain and simple overcrowded.
> Whereas the latter - eliminating male physical advantage from competition - is necessary for fairness and, in the case of contact sports, for safety.
Regarding the safety aspect in contact sports - I think the better solution is to leave that decision to the women themselves, but generally I'd more argue to ban or seriously restrict contact sports because a looot of them have had very nasty links to brain injuries uncovered.
> Evidence-based policy approaches typically draw the line at the male physical advantage of testosterone-driven development.
The question remains: do we really want to require athletes to submit to full-blown genetic and hormonal assays? Do we really want to require minor athletes to submit to genital examinations for no medical reason? The obsession a lot of people have with genitalia is absurd.
The problem is male prisoners, yes. Which is why segregating prisoners by sex is an essential component of safeguarding. And then further separation of vulnerable prisoners within each prison. If, in a male prison, there are inmates who desire to be women and are deemed to be at risk based on this, they should be separated from the general prison population, like other vulnerable prisoners are. Not transferred to a female prison.
Regarding the female category of sports, a sample of cells taken via a cheek swab can be used for karyotype testing, which would be sufficient for screening female athletes. This is much less intrusive than the anti-doping tests - which involve having blood taken and being observed urinating - that for many athletes is a requirement to compete. In the unusual case that the athlete has something other than 46,XX sex chromosomes, further analysis could be done - with the athlete's permission - to understand the underlying condition and, from this, determine eligibility to compete in this category.
No-one is advocating for all female athletes, including children, to undergo genital inspections. It isn't necessary and it's not being asked for.
The only sensible solution to that is segregation within male prisons, as is done for other vulnerable groups of inmates such as ex-cops, gang informants, pedophiles, child killers, and similar.
Incarcerating males in the female prison estate was an absurd and demonstrably harmful policy, and it's very good news that this will now no longer be the case in the federal prison system.
How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.