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he/him/his

  • 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Some people are questioning why there are gender-specific categories in chess.

    That’s a good question and my understanding is that there is only a female category and then the general one where both men and women can participate. The female one seems to have been created to encourage the participation of women due to the general one being monopolized by men.

    You may agree or not with that reasoning and I am not trying to take any stance on it, just trying to answer the questions on why they created a gender-specific category in the first place.

    I am not really into chess competitions and my understanding of this point is based on explanations I saw from others elsewhere, so I may be wrong.



  • If you look at the data, the main reason why people detransition is not because “transition wasn’t right” for them.

    Turban et al. found in 2021 that among the people who have detransitioned, the vast majority of them (82.5 %) cited external factors for detransitioning such as pressure from parents (35.6 %), other family members (25.9 %), partners (20.2 %) or friends (14.2 %), societal stigma (32.5 %), difficulty to get a job as a trans person (26.9 %) or pressure from employers (17.5 %) as opposed to 15.9 % citing internal factors with only 1 % citing not being able to identify with the gender they had transitioned to, 2.4 % having doubts about their gender and 10.5 % citing having fluctuations about their gender.

    And I would even say that only that 1 % could fit in that definition of people who detransitioned because “transition wasn’t right for them”, as having doubts or fluctuations about their gender can mean something else (like transitioning to something else like non-binary or gender-fluid).

    So the vast majority of people who have detransitioned did it because of how hard it was made by transphobes to live their lives as trans people, not because the transition wasn’t right for them.
    It’s kind of a self-fulfilled prophecy where transphobes make trans people’s lives so hard that some of them are not able to bear with it anymore so they have to detransition and then transphobes say “see, they had to detransition because they regret having transitioned, hence transitioning is wrong”.

    It’s the same kind of self-fulfilled prophecy as those LGBT±phobic people who say they wouldn’t want to have LGBT+ kids because they would be less happy, but the only ones trying to make LGBT+ people’s lives miserable are those phobes themselves.




  • I think the same every time there is criticism of “pinkwashing” and “rainbow capitalism”.
    Yeah, some may be doing it just for profit and as a PR stunt, but it still matters.
    I remember pride parades in London and Brighton were full of corporate floats like those from Deliveroo, Starbucks and National Rail.
    Did they do it just for promotion? OK, maybe. But it still sends the message. A message that says that when you go into a National Rail train or a Starbucks café you can feel safe. And a message that other companies can also join and show that support without fearing that may damage their business with them.
    Unfortunately, those messages are still needed today, so I don’t really care very much if they do it for marketing as long as it still works for the cause.
    If you are going to a bar and see they have tuned their logo to show the pride colors during June, they may be doing it for marketing, but at least you will know you can come in and feel safe there.
    I even saw a float from the Premier League in Brighton and we know how much work is still needed there.



  • I 100 % understand that it’s not easy and you may be scared of making that step even with supporting parents.
    But we tend to imagine the outcome will be much worse than what it will probably be. And of course I don’t know your situation and maybe your fear of a bad outcome is fully justified.
    If you are sure your parents are transphobic and you still depend on them, maybe you will have to assess when it’s a safe moment for you to make that move.
    I think the best thing you can do is to seek help from an affirmative psychologist to help you assimilate that no one should give up living their own lives for the fear of upsetting or disappointing others and help you find the best moment to safely start asserting your identity. If that’s not an option for you because seeking that kind of help would still need to go through your parents, you can search for local or online LGBT support groups.