Mick Hartley

This week “FIDE”, the international chess body, announced that transwomen would be excluded from competing in the female category whilst a two year investigation is conducted. While generally welcoming this, a number of commentators, women in particular, were not happy. There's no physical competition involved – so should this be taken as an acknowledgement that women aren't really as clever as men, just as, with sports like cycling and running, they're not as strong?

Well, no. Jean Hatchet —Why women’s chess matters:

Though it is estimated that the game of chess was invented around the 7th century, it wasn’t until the late 1800s that women were allowed to play. Twelve centuries is a very long wait. Women are used to waiting to take part in activities that men take for granted as their right, be it in an academic or a sporting realm.

It is therefore no surprise that when women do make those gains — when they are granted elusive access to areas previously reserved by and for men — they are often more than happy to partake away from the men who ridiculed and excluded them….

The assertion that “transwomen” do not pose any problem in such a category is advanced by trans activists because, they say, there is no physical advantage for a man who says he is a woman in the game of chess. That isn’t the issue. His presence requires that women believe he is a woman. Many women don’t and won’t. They are required to pretend, and they refuse. If it is possible to say that being female matters in swimming, but not chess, the question of being female becomes arbitrary according to circumstance. Women reject this sifting and juggling of our bodies and their immutable reality….

Supporters of “inclusion” in women’s chess do not grasp what female-only spaces or activities feel like if you actually are a woman. They envy it as a concept; they see it as an interesting obstacle to cross as part of an imagined quest to become female, but they will never really understand it. In part, the camaraderie found when women gather together socially is a direct result of women being shunned by patriarchy for millennia. Historically women nevertheless managed to find and cherish time with each other away from men, and they still do. We love being in the company of other women. Women collectively loosen their shoulders when no man is around. They laugh, talk, share, heal and plot. If you put just one male bodied person into that space, something happens immediately to that dynamic of perceived freedom. Women adapt.

In the game of chess, each player is aware of where the King is throughout. The King is the tallest of the chess men. Nowhere is the patriarchy more symbolically represented than on a chess board. When a man enters women’s space, just like the chess piece of the King, he is noticed. He is sometimes surrounded, sometimes rejected. Different women react differently; some protect him, some avoid him, but he is always noted. A man saying he is a woman is no different, because all of us know it isn’t true.

Women are not pawns to validate men with a desire to experience female bonding….

Well yes, the game is all about protecting the king at all costs: any threat is "check", while if it's unsurmountable then it's "checkmate" and game over. But of course he's a useless piece during the course of the game – just one square at a time (apart from castling) – so his power is, as it were, purely symbolic. The most powerful piece on the board is the queen. It's she who does the heavy lifting, putting herself in danger and threatening the opposition while the uselsss king hides away behing the pawns.

So while chess may indeed provide a symbolic representation of the patriarchy, it does come with a subversive twist.