Trans women are banned from women’s world chess events. How did we get here?

FIDE, the organisation that governs the international chess competition, announced this week that transgender women will effectively be banned from playing in women’s world chess events until further notice.

What unfair advantage a trans woman could have in this field is not explained in the updated handbook, which simply states players who transition “from a male to a female” have “no right” to play in official events until “further analysis”. At a glance, even the most fervent “women’s sports rights” campaigners haven’t been asking for this. How the hell did it come to this?

Crikey collects the accelerating panic around trans women in sport.

1976

In 1976, tennis player Renée Richards was outed as transgender by local TV anchor Richard Carlson, whose son Tucker has done so much to advance this conversation since. It caused a mini-storm: the US Tennis Association (USTA), the Women’s Tennis Association and the US Open Committee required all female competitors to verify their sex via the “Barr body test” of their chromosomes. 

When Richards refused ahead of the 1976 US Open, the USTA refused to let her compete. Richards sued, claiming she was being discriminated against based on gender. The USTA’s defence was such perfect Cold War-era paranoia we’re amazed it didn’t form a subplot in Rocky IV:

Because of the millions of dollars of prizemoney available to competitors, because of nationalistic desires to excel in athletics, and because of worldwide experiments, especially in the Iron Curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago, the USTA has been especially sensitive to its obligation to assure fairness of competition among the athletes competing in the US Open.

Richards was backed by Billie Jean King, who argued in an affidavit: “[Richards] does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors in the sport of tennis.” Judge Alfred M Ascione found in Richards’ favour, ruling: “This person is now a female.”

She played, and was eliminated in the first round by Virginia Wade. She and Betty Ann Stuart made it to the doubles final, where they were beaten.

Upon her elimination at the hands of Wade (who noted later that she hadn’t found Richards’ serve as hard as she had expected), Richards downplayed the social significance of her appearance, telling The Washington Post: “There are no other transsexuals trying to play professional sports right now, and I would be surprised if there are more than five or six over the next 10 or 15 years. I doubt seriously that there was anything precedent-setting about this at all.”

For some time, that would prove to be true.

2008

South Africa’s Caster Semenya is not trans. She was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl and identifies as a woman. She has an intersex condition that gives her a testosterone level higher than the typical female range.

When she became the 800-metre world champion in 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) demanded she take a test affirming her gender. She has since been banned from competing in the races she’s best at by IAAF regulations demanding women with her condition take medication to suppress their testosterone levels. This lead to a debate around whether an athlete had to conform to broad ideas of womanhood to qualify as a woman.

“Certain bodies are never allowed to be female, are never allowed to be women, are never allowed to just be,” Pidgeon Pagonis, an intersex activist told Vox regarding the Semenya case in 2019.

2021

Transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand competed at the Tokyo Olympics. She failed to complete any of her first three lifts and was thus ruled out of medal contention in the women’s over-87 kilogram division.

Quinn, a non-binary and trans midfielder for the Canadian women’s football team, became the first openly trans athlete to win an Olympic medal when the team took gold. It passed without great controversy.

2022

A Republican Senate candidate in Missouri put out a campaign ad focused on Lia Thomas, a trans woman having success as a college-level swimmer. The ad said: “Women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women.” Thomas was made a lightning rod for the debate around trans women in sport.

Olympic silver medallist Erica Sullivan wrote in Newsweek: “Like anyone else in this sport, Lia has trained diligently to get to where she is and has followed all of the rules and guidelines put before her … She doesn’t win every time. And when she does, she deserves, like anyone else in this sport, to be celebrated for her hard-won success, not labelled a cheater simply because of her identity.”

In June, swimming regulator FINA voted to bar transgender women from the elite women’s competition if they had experienced any part of male puberty. International Rugby League implemented a ban in July.

The scientist informing FINA’s policy found transgender women maintained a performance advantage over female athletes if they underwent male puberty before transitioning, but as the ABC noted, it is unclear how it reached that conclusion.

2023

In March, the IAAF issued a ban on trans women competing against cis women. Cycling’s governing body did the same in July.

In June, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in the US passed a bill to force schools that receive federal money to place athletes on the team that matches their birth gender; 19 Republican-controlled states have implemented similar laws over recent years. 

There as yet are no trans women competing at the highest level in track and field, or swimming.

University of Colorado Boulder Professor Roger Pielke Jr, a sports governance expert, called “a moral panic” over transgender athletes that was completely disproportionate to their numbers.

“We’re just shadow-boxing now,” Pielke told AP in 2022. “As if there’s not bigger issues sport could deal with.”