With these new rules, FIDE has managed to
- Imply the mental inferiority of women
- Validate the existence of transgender men
- Destroy the integrity of awards record-keeping
- Call transgender women men
Very nice, FIDE, incredible mental gymnastics performance! 👏 Add them to the ever lengthening sports federation shitlist.
Just gonna paste an old comment I made about trans athletes. TL;DR: athletic advantages/disadvantages diminish after ~2 years of HRT. There’s no good reason to exclude trans people from elite sports. Athletes already undergo testing to make sure their hormones levels are within pre-determined limits.
British Journal of Sports Medicine states 2 years after receiving gender affirming hormones, athletic advantages disappeared with an exception to running, in which trans- women had 9% faster lap times. Trans-men were on par with their biological male counterparts after just 1 year of hormone therapy.
Medscape has an interview with Joanna Harper, and advisor to the I0C on gender and sports about this very topic. In the interview she mentions a study out of Brazil that indicates a further decrease in strength in trans-women (MtF) athletes after 36 months, further diminishing any potential physiological advantage in these athletes.
There’s also something to be said about who these arguments are targeting. There are very few elite trans athletes and they already have to conform to strict guidelines on blood hormone levels and other doping tactics, just like everyone else at that level. The arguments are largely against high schoolers (children) who just want to participate in something. No one is taking puberty blockers and gender affirming hormones just to take a trophy home in high school. It’s a ridiculous argument through and through. A thinly veiled attempt to further marginalize and discriminate against a vulnerable population
The issue of transgender athletes was basically resolved several years ago when the IOC decided on two years of feminizing hormones before transgender women could compete in the female category. But due to the re-emergence of the anti-queer culture war, sports federations are re-litigating the issue and throwing science out the door.