Transgender man wins women's 100 yd and 400 yd freestyle races.

Call me crazy but I don't see how having their accomplishments valued as 200 points less than a male's encourages female players. Can they just give them a rose gold trophy instead of a gold one? /shrug

I think I get now, thanks. The sentance that had initially bothered me was this one:

The issue is that women’s titles are considered less valuable by the FIDE, so a Woman Grandmaster wouldn’t be tranferred a general Grandmaster.

So I'm guessing that is a jounralist twisting things a little. Presumably all the titles are conferred on the basis of rankiing points (or competiton results, again beyond my knowledge) and the "value" of the title from a FIDE perpective is essentially the number of points required to be conferred with the title. The higher the points, the more prestigous the title. So the jouno has kind of written it backwards essentially. FIDE has created female only titles that have lower ranking points requriements than their open equivalent. It's not that they "value" the tiles less. It's that they are easier to obtain than their open equivalents.

'about as valuable.'

The dominance of males in the grandmaster level could indicate true differences in the sexes here but I'm unclear what that is.

There’s no differences between the sexes in terms of their ability, the dominance of males at Grandmaster level is simply because chess is a more popular game among boys and men than girls and women. The women’s titles were conceived with the intent of encouraging more girls and women to play chess and to compete in competition, but that competition is still regarded at a lower level than the competitions which are not restricted to women only.

Because I am indeed a cynical sort, this latest move by FIDE appears to be more of a jumping on the bandwagon to promote chess. There’s already considerable disagreement over whether or not it constitutes a sport at all, but when it comes to the sex of the participants, there’s no actual differences apart from the participants perceptions and how that can influence their performance -

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.440

I'm interested in the conclusions from Chess (and hopefully has less built in biases and let's science answer the questions directly), it's one sport where the playing field is about as level as it gets physically and you'd expect the differences to come down to number of players in the sport.

However, the mention of age is interesting, as it implies that either or both brain deterioration and physical deterioration play a part as people get older which also implies that differences between males and females in those areas could lend one group a built in advantage (on average and accepting there will be outliers).

It would also disprove the notion of sports themselves adapting to become completely gender neutral (barring team quotas) in the absence of millions of years of evolution that caused those differences to disappear (which is, again, unlikely in evolutionary terms).

"Titles. If a player holds any of the women titles, but the gender has been changed to a man, the women titles are to be abolished. Those can be renewed if the person changes the gender back to a woman and can prove the ownership of the respective FIDE ID that holds the title. The abolished women title may be transferred into a general title of the same or lower level (e.g., WGM may be transferred into FM, WIM into CM, etc.)."

It isn't a matter of the report being 'poorly worded'

Double standards exist in the sport.

Yes, yes they are.

And I know you didn’t say anything about my view of the titles, I was just clarifying that I don’t see the titles as derogatory, I see their existence as derogatory though, because like I said they indicate to women that they are of lesser importance to the game of chess. It’s why I joked that I could already imagine the jokes going around about the queens gambit off the back of these new rules.

The reason you reminded me of that incident at all was when you first made the point that cop on was generally used as opposed to sex or gender, which is true, and is still true, it’s only the titles that will change. When you said it was bad English though, then I presented it as an example of not just bad English, but a bad attitude towards women’s participation in the game. That he just kept digging a hole for himself when questioned on it only made matters worse! For him it was a throwaway remark, for the other commentator and the audience it was facepalm inducing 😂

I know you didn’t explicitly say it, again I was just clarifying because there’s little point in even bringing it up, and I made the point that in any case it would apply to both sexes equally - autism isn’t something which would inhibit their ability to attain the title of Grandmaster, regardless of the observer bias that suggests there is a correlation between autism and Grandmasters. That’s all it is - a correlation, not causation.

Chess.com

FIDE currently awards the title of GM to a player who achieves a 2500 FIDE classical (or 'standard') rating and three GM norms. 

https://www.chess.com/terms/grandmaster-chess

As the name implies, the WGM title is attainable by only women players. They can attain it by achieving a FIDE classical rating of at least 2300 with at least 30 rated games as well as three norms. The title was created in 1976, and it is worth noting that woman players may attain any FIDE title—not woman titles solely.

https://www.chess.com/terms/woman-grandmaster-chess