the fact that trans men/mascs who have won women's chess titles are stripped of them and banned from the women's division upon transitioning is a great example of what we mean when we say society needs to stop punishing us for coming out

the fact that FIDE has a women's division is specifically due to historical misogyny in chess as a cultural phenomenon. people assigned/presumed female are far less likely to be encouraged to pursue chess, and those presumed-female chess players face stereotype threat and exclusion from social networks that directly impair the ability to learn and develop a support system. so a women's division was created as a kind of level playing field for all of those folks to compete in without the pressure of having to be measured against cis men (i.e. the historically dominant class)

but not trans men, fuck them, be a real man or get out, I guess

most grandmaster-level players have been playing since they were like, 5-8 years old, to be clear. like it is the type of game where you seem to need early exposure to spur brain development in the areas of the visual cortex responsible for picking up patterns on the board. the difference in treatment based on birth assignment is extremely relevant to a young player's potential to reach a high level and win titles.

something I've thought about regularly, being in STEM nowadays, is just how disadvantaged I am compared to my peers who were raised as boys. their parents put them in all sorts of STEM related clubs and activities. they did science fair projects. they were given STEM education as normal hobby things to do, and were encouraged to do so. for those of the younger age brackets, their social media feeds had educational content about science thrown onto them as something they'd be more likely to be interested in. a lot of them had already learned basically all of the basic physics and math and science concepts before even getting to college, because they spent a childhood getting familiarized with them and primed to understand them via normalized hobbies that encouraged the development of those specific knowledge areas. they had a head start.

meanwhile, I learned home ec and sewing and art and music and other hobbies that weren't really related to STEM, except maybe just computer literacy in general as a necessity. so when I got to college, I had to learn a bunch of stuff that I hadn't been super well introduced to before. obviously, I had high school classes. but it's still different.