Jan Bergstra and Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
NRC recently published an interview with Petra de Sutter, the deputy prime minister of Belgium who is herself a trans woman. In the interview, she simplistically takes a position on the role of trans women in sports, showing, in our view, little interest in the issues at hand today. Take the following passage, in which De Sutter comments negatively on the international chess federation FIDE’s decision not to allow trans women in women’s tournaments for the time being:
De Sutter, Europe’s only transgender minister, is following the issue closely. “A week or two ago I read that the International Chess Federation is banning trans women from entering the women’s competition. Chess, right. Not weightlifting.”
What was the argument?
“None. Simply: those are not real women. But why would trans women threaten women’s competition? Because they are smarter? Better at chess?”
Both women and men are allowed to compete in the World Chess Championship, but the reality is that women don’t make it to the top.
Cynical: “Because they’re not smart enough?”
May have something to do with the fact that women had less access to the chessboard for a long time.
“I think you can talk about physical differences in this discussion. In muscle mass, skeletal building. But are we really going to talk about the brain?”
In reality, FIDE wants to take two years to think through the issues and come up with a considered policy. The blockade on participation by trans women in the women’s competitions for which FIDE is responsible is therefore temporary, and pending final decisions. And it is not a crazy idea to take your time well before making an informed decision.
To begin with, the IOC has assigned responsibility to international sports federations to make appropriate policies regarding the participation of transgender persons in the sporting events within their scope. FIDE now also works along that line.
Second, a so-called “female competition category” in sports adds value. Without such segregation on gender, cis-women (by the classic description: AFAB or assigned female at birth, and then not having been in transition) have in many cases a very low chance of being in the prizes.
Whatever its causes, it is that situation that provides the justification for this splitting of “competition categories.” In chess, this circumstance also occurs. That perception does not include or presuppose any judgment about its causes.
The importance of carefully guarding the boundaries of such categories is also evident when we imagine the hypothetical trans woman P. We assume for a moment that P is around 35 years old, assigtned male at birth (AMAB) and was among the world’s top 50 male chess players in 2021. We also assume that P has made the transition to woman by 2022.
According to the view of transactivists as organized in Stonewall, a person P is a woman as soon as P claims of herself to be a woman. We assume that P “is” a woman solely on the basis of its own assertion on the matter. No one is preventing P from making this transition with the primary goal of winning a chess competition amidst women.
One may think that this scenario is exotic, but it is not. On the contrary, this kind of scenario was a trigger for the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) of the United Kingdom To recently propose a far-reaching policy that puts the notion of “biological sex” back at the center, now that transactivism has made the term gender (and with it the concepts of male and female) completely detached from biological characteristics.
This is exactly where Petra de Sutter’s comment misses the boat. She does not or will not see that the question of whether P is a real woman (however phrased) does arise.
This has now led to both Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Tories) and Sir Keir Starmer (Labour) giving a clear and unequivocal negative response in the United Kingdom. Politics in the UK on the question of “what is a woman” has visibly shifted in recent months. Perhaps Brexit will give the UK the necessary independence to think for itself on these issues.
We do not deny that some transgender people have changed gender. We do deny (see also our analysis of the situation in international swimming, blog AGTRT-BF3) that the necessary clarity on participation has been achieved with that determination.
Petra de Sutter’s suggestion that “one can/should understand what gender is” is too short of the mark. To begin with, there is indeed a debate internationally in science as to whether a person can change gender purely by their own will.
But even when this has been clarified, this has not yet developed a policy for the admission into competitions of transgender persons, nor has consensus been reached on the desirability of the gender (rather than biological sex) based division of “competition categories.”
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