LGBTQ+ Rights and America

It's probably bigotry though, FIDE are virulently awful in essentially every other way so it wouldn't be out of character for them to do this entirely out of bigotry.

Transgender women banned from women's chess events

So it looks like that physical advantage talking point really was a load of bollocks after all.

That was talked about last page.

In other news, North Carolina overrides Governor's veto and bans gender affirming care.

In a state Senate vote of 27-18, after a state house vote of 74-45 earlier, North Carolina becomes the 22nd state to restrict gender affirming care for minors. What makes it sadder is that 2 Democrats joined with the Republicans to override the veto. Not that the Democrats could do much, even if they voted together, because of Tricia Cotham changing parties from Democrat to Republican earlier and basically forgoing all stated values, Republicans have a veto-proof majority in both sides of the state legislature. Still, sad to hear as more and more dominos fall.

Edited by HeyMikey on Aug 18th 2023 at 5:20:19 AM

That exists - you can see it when you look at the world/olympic records for virtually every sport - it’s just not applicable here, which makes the chess thing absolutely idiotic.

Edited by Galadriel on Aug 18th 2023 at 9:48:38 AM

I do think it's worth noting that there aren't actually any major studies in terms of how trans women compete with cis women. There's like two really tiny scale studies that both found no meaningful differences.

Anything available to cite is actually comparing cis men and cis women and doesn't take into account the process of transitioning at all. Considering that there are exactly no cases of trans women effortlessly dominating the competition in any sport under any circumstances, the idea that trans women are inherently better than cis women at sports is very suspicious and has no meaningful backing.

And to be clear, you can find cases of trans women winning a particular competition, but they tend to only do it by a small amount and usually don't tend to win at all. Lia Thomas only won one event out of like, eight, and usually placed much lower, for example. There's also no studies at all about how trans men compete against cis men.

And if we have any choir pedantics around, I mean there are no peer-reviewed and published studies that show any advantages.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 18th 2023 at 3:41:16 PM

I did a quick check, and didn't find trans women setting world/Olympic records. So yeah, the argument of them physically dominating 'virtually every sport' doesn't hold much water.

Edited by ciyinwanderer on Aug 18th 2023 at 4:04:01 AM

The only things where that might hold up are things involving height elements...but those things are in sports that already either select for height (basketball) or are divided by height/weight categories anyway (wrestling). Trans women would just get sorted into the categories they would be in if they were cis.

There is no evidence of trans women dominating sports. There is a fuckton of evidence of transphobes claiming a lot of random cis women in sports are trans to try and make their point sound better.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 18th 2023 at 5:47:55 AM

I know, right? Transphobes never remember trans men exist.

Well, Transwomen seem to be the victim of Transphobia far more often than Transmen in general.

I mean it kinda makes sense in that case since trans men obviously have no physical advantage over cis men, so there’s no debate to be had. Though in the case of chess there shouldn’t be a debate regardless.

The focus is on trans women because trans women break the rules in way that completely breaks the brains of a lot of idiot conservatives. Most people in that crowd see women as second-class. As lesser. A lot of the women terfs in the UK won't shut up about how miserable their empty upper-middle-class lives are. So (from their perspective), they can't figure out why a "man" would want to be a "woman" and they latch on to "they're pervs" or "they're trying to cheat" to try and explain why, to them, someone would deliberately move down a tier in society.

Trans men can't be attacked with that angle, so you get really, really creepy shit like Allison Bailey saying that trans men are tricking young girls into "chopping off breasts that have never been fondled" or other similar things.

The shared element is that it boils down to "we need to protect our women and girls from predators, so we will destroy the lives and freedoms of our women and girls" because "but what about the women and children" can excuse basically anything.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 18th 2023 at 8:10:50 AM

Public harassment is not "worse" than erasure, just more visible.

Yeah, speaking as an ace person who is also an adult autistic person, erasure is pretty horrible to be subjected to. It's a lot of "no, I, a person with zero knowledge or understanding of this situation, have determined that your lived experiences do not happen." In some ways, it's better than active bigotry, but in other ways, it's worse, because it means you don't get a support structure or much solidarity because even people who are supposed to be on your side buy into the erasure stuff.

Ace people get this all the time, where regardless of our actual romantic inclinations, we're told we're "basically straight" and a lot of attempts to date result in anyone who finds out about the ace thing going "I can fix that" dick pic. Ace people are targeted with corrective...uh, assault a lot because a lot of people really don't want to believe that we really exist.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 18th 2023 at 8:23:06 AM

To my understanding, ace people also get shit from some members of the LGBT+ community because of that; Being told that ace people can ”mask” easier as straight people, so therefore they shouldn’t be included under the LGBT+ banner.

I have no idea how common that actually is (Hopefully, it’s very uncommon), but it’s really hypocritical of the people who think that; Gatekeeping and refusing to let certain people be considered part of the community because they ”haven’t suffered enough.” Sounds like Misery Poker to me.

It's unfortunately not uncommon at all.

Bisexuals, particularly ones in opposite-sex relationships, also get excluded and ridiculed as insufficiently queer because they can "pass" as straight, never mind that bi people more commonly suffer domestic and sexual abuse than straight or gay people...

Edited by Perseus on Aug 19th 2023 at 6:33:41 PM

Intraminority discrimination is a hell of a thing.

To claify, what I meant is that there are clear differences between cis men and cis women that justify the separation of many physical athletic competitions by sex (whereas there is no such justification for chess). Not that there is any clear evidence on how trans men and trans women relate to that. I said that bc I’ve seen posts saying that all sports and athletics competition should be co-ed, which I don’t agree with.

Edited by Galadriel on Aug 19th 2023 at 5:35:53 AM

co-ed means co-education, it has nothing to do with sports. Now perhaps you were talking about school competition, but I think you would be opposed to mixed-sex sport competitions outside of school as well.

EDIT: Apparently the term is used to refer to sports as well. I stand corrected, though. I think that calling a mixed-sport "coed" is not a good idea.

Edited by Risa123 on Aug 19th 2023 at 5:06:53 PM

There's a lot of hate from allosexual queer people towards asexuals, although with increasing visibility it's hopefully slowly dying down. Besides the whole "passing" issue a lot of them like to insist that we don't exist or that we're delusional/mentally ill, or they accuse us of projecting unrelated traumas onto ourselves and calling it a sexuality. This despite many of us not even having said traumas, now who's the one projecting here?

A lot of these arguments look similar to the ones cishet people will use to denigrate trans people, or monosexuals to discredit bisexuals, and so on.

It's completely ridiculous when a lot of us share related social traumas with the queer community at large. Peer pressure to conform? Check. Religious pressure to conform? Check. Excluded from mainstream media? Until really recently, check! People claiming you're just damaged or haven't met the right person? Check! Saying you don't exist? Check! People randomly offering to correctively assault you if they find out your sexuality? Absolutely!

A few months ago there was an article going around about fundies wanting to make platonic marriages illegal, so. I guess marriage rights too.

The bi-erasure one seriously annoys me, because it feels like some members of the LGBT+ community think that, if you’re bi, you MUST date/marry somebody of the same gender, otherwise it ”doesn’t count.”

Like, what absolute horseshit is that? Why do the people who say that have to partake in bi-erasure? And ace-erasure, as well?

Edited by MagmaTeaMerry on Aug 19th 2023 at 6:24:40 PM

Well, sadly there is one thing all allosexuals regardless of orientation share and that is living in a society with often bizarrely obsessed with sex. It seems that for some this social for lack of better word indoctrination overrides everything else. I should note that I'm saying all this as a self-proclaimed "pervert". Yet, even I can see how bizarre is the approach some people have toward sexuality.

Isn't there a term for that, like amatonormativity?

Amatonormativity is the expectation that everyone pursues (typically monogamous) romantic relationships. It leads people to deny the possibility of aromantic people existing.

Edited by Ghostninja109 on Aug 19th 2023 at 9:36:34 AM

Yeah, it basically is the assumption that a fully-fledged person needs to be in a romantic relationship to feel whole and complete and happy. Sex is not required, as fictional works depicting asexual people in a chaste romantic relationship may also conform to amatonormativity. But for obvious reasons, amatonormativity does tend to disproportionately affect asexual people despite being even more antithetical to the aro end of the ace umbrella.

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 19th 2023 at 10:36:46 AM