We’re all familiar with the controversy over allowing men into women’s sports.
Less familiar is the subject of contests of the intellect, of kind that wins chess matches.
Clearly, men as a group are superior to women (as a group) in physical contests, but is that true also of competition in certain cerebral activities, such as chess?
The 2025 French women’s chess champion is a man who goes by the name of Yosha Iglesias. (I could not quickly find his male birth name.) Yosha, who is of the male sex, says that he tried to live as a man, but could not. He is now celebrated as a trailblazing pioneer for “transgender women” in the field of high-level chess competition.
This is peculiar, because while championship chess does indeed require a certain amount of physical stamina, it does not compare to football, boxing or volleyball, where women generally are decisively defeated by physically dominant men.
Yet, for good reason, there is a separate competition category for women in chess. They play at a very high degree of skill, but fare rather poorly against men in master championship play. This suggests that women’s brains, not just muscles, are different from men’s. That would explain why a man of lesser talent in men's chess could win against the strongest women chess players in France, as Iglesias did.
There are a lot of theories about this -- men have fewer and stronger neural pathways, promoting logical thinking, or the variability hypothesis, dating back to Charles Darwin. Men also are naturally more competitive.
Competitive chess is not the only area where this kind of intellect is prized, and where women are dominated by men.
Poker is another. I have not kept up with the topic of women’s poker competition in recent years, but I do recall that a casino tried to restrict its women’s poker category to women — but this was ruled out as discriminatory.
One man entered the women’s tournament, and he won first place.
In open competition, some women do very well against the men, but they almost never finish in the highest places (referred to as the final tables) of a major tournament.
One more embarrassment for the “women can do anything that men can do,” crowd, involves the field of mathematics. Where are the women math wizards? There are some, but very few compared to men. It does seem, if one can believe the expert studies, that women suffer no inherent handicap in math abilities, so other reasons must be found for the apparent profound deficit of women mathematicians.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, the now-famous psychology professor, formerly at University of Toronto, attributes some disparities to the voluntary choices that women are rightly allowed to make for themselves. As he says, men are more interested in things; women are more interested in people. That, not discrimination or malicious “steering,” explains why even in the most liberal societies, such as in Scandinavia, women choose nursing over engineering, and by a vast proportion.
Which brings us back to chess. Chess is not merely a game. It is an intense contest that requires a certain amount of warrior attitude, an orientation towards competition.
Strategy centers around the king, but the most powerful fighting piece is the queen. Shouldn’t that make the game more feminist?
Not at all. Once one gets past the symbolic names of the pawns and pieces, the actual mental competitive skills involved, appeal far more strongly to the masculine than to the feminine in human nature.
The term, transgender, is an invented, fictional word without biological meaning, for those of you who “follow the science.” There are actual men and actual women, plus a minuscule portion of aberrations that do not demonstrate any sort of spectrum of various genders.
Great harm is done when the most basic of social norms are torn asunder by, not the “transgenders” themselves, but by those who, whether misguided or malevolent, attempt to impose a fantasy upon reality.
Iglesias will continue to displace women chess players, but perhaps worse, will corrupt the formality of the very game that he rides to fame and profit. Eventually, all the actual women will find themselves sidelined from women’s competition, and will be sent back, by men, to the proverbial kitchen, from which they fought so hard to escape.
Talk about sacrificing the queen!
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License