Stalemate of pieties

Gloating at other people’s problems is morally wrong, and it’s certainly not Christian.

But I can’t help myself: whenever two woke orthodoxies turn out to be mutually exclusive, I experience a most delicious, nerve-ending stroking feeling of schadenfreude. I’ll have to talk to Fr Michael about this, see what he says.

I do hope he’ll absolve this sin (he has let me get away with much worse ones). So it’s with a sense of expected impunity that I smile like the Cheshire Cat observing the scandal engulfing the world of chess.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has passed a rule stating that any player who has transitioned from male to female “has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women.”

This has created a mighty outburst of indignation in all sorts of quarters, and I can see why. Hell, I can even sympathise with their predicament, although not too much.

The received view has been laconically worded by the Tory (!) minister Penny Mordaunt: “Trans women are women.” Agreed. But if that’s the case, why can’t they participate in women’s athletic events? Such as tennis, the only game other than chess that I know quite well.

In fact, it was tennis that opened that door ajar. In 1975 a good amateur player Richard Ruskind became Renée Richards. It took him/her two years to force his/her way into professional women’s tennis. In another two years, at age 45 (!), Richards got to the semi-finals of the US Open and achieved a ranking in the top 20, thus proving it’s possible to play tennis without balls.

That focused many minds, including those that didn’t object to that abomination on principle. If a male amateur well past his sell-by date could become a top female pro, there was a flaw there somewhere.

Yes, Renée was undeniably a woman, all progressive people agreed on that. But because she used to be a man she wasn’t quite, well, quite. Obviously her former sex conferred certain physical advantages, such as greater strength, faster speed around the court and more stamina. Hence such undeniable women should be barred from women’s tournaments.

That was almost half a century ago, but I remember having my sense of logic offended. Either a trans woman is a woman or she isn’t. If she isn’t, let’s shout that from the rooftops. But if she is, keeping her out of women’s tennis is unfair and, which is worse, illogical.

Since then, what started out as a weird eccentricity has grown into a collective mental illness. Penny Mordaunt’s pronouncement is an orthodoxy that brooks no argument. Trans rights have now superseded all others, including the time-honoured right to maintain one’s sanity.

Trans women are women, and if you disagree you aren’t just someone who has a different view. You are an enemy to be hounded to the ends of the earth. Our laws are still too wishy-washy to throw you in jail, but you’ll be subjected to a career-ending ostracism.

Yet even against that febrile background trans women are still kept out of women’s sports requiring intense physical activity. Even if those sideshows pump themselves full of oestrogen and bring their testosterone level down into the female range, sports authorities still believe their male past gives them unfair advantages.

So it does. For example, in a 100-metre sprint, the men’s world record is almost a full second under the women’s. That means that a decent male college sprinter would win every race, including the Olympics, with room to spare.

But what about chess? Surely a chess player doesn’t derive any particular benefit from being able to run faster or lift greater weights than his rival? So what’s wrong with trans women playing against what Ricky Gervais calls “old-fashioned women, those with a womb”?

After all, chess is a mental, not physical game. It requires no muscular strength beyond what it takes to push pieces on the board.

What it does require is spatial imagination (similar to what’s involved in geometry), prodigious memory, a sense of structure (which explains why so many musicians are good at chess) and a calculating ability better than a modern accountant’s (who cheats by using calculators and computers, which chess players don’t do, at least in theory).

All these are intellectual qualities, aren’t they? And even if we begrudgingly admit that men are faster and stronger than women, we’d denounce to the thought police anyone who claims that men are smarter.

Anything men can do, women can do as well, if not better – you get that, you reactionary troglodyte you? I do, I really do, please don’t hurt me. But FIDE evidently doesn’t.

By denying trans women access to women’s tournaments, that august organisation as good as says out loud that men are intellectually superior to women. And the skies haven’t yet opened, and a lightning hasn’t struck to smite those infidels, those heretics, those apostates – those enemies!

Now I’d better come clean. I don’t think men are inherently smarter than women – if anything, I’m inclined to believe it’s the opposite. Penelope, for example, is definitely smarter than me, and whenever I can’t cope with a simple task I catch her surreptitious derisory glances.

Without getting into an argument about which sex thinks better, let’s just accept the blindingly obvious fact that they think differently. Women are better at some tasks and men at some others – that’s how God (or Darwin if such is your wont) made us.

And even the briefest of glances at the history of chess ought to convince anyone that one task men are better at is playing chess. Only one woman, Judith Polgar, has ever played against top male players on even terms.

Even a hack like me could back in my chess-playing youth hold his own against top female players. Specifically one such player, a former USSR champion, who was my girlfriend for a while. We never played a serious game, but we had an almost even score in blitz matches.

FIDE has taken a realistic approach to the problem, rising above ideology for the time being. That clearly couldn’t assuage the wounded sensibilities of those who live and breathe ideology.

Predictably, both biologically female feminists and trans female extremists have their knickers in a twist, now that the second group are entitled to wear that garment. The feminists are screaming bloody discrimination, the trans fanatics resent the implication that somehow they aren’t real women.

Me, I stay on the side lines, gloating quietly and enjoying myself. I hope both sides lose.