I completely agree with you. As noted by others, this is not a question of managing gender equality in competition: chess has no inherent gender advantage. Though there are significant structural biases for men in competition which is why the ratio of women to men in competition is so low.

This is entirely about political, religious, and social pressure attempting to limit social change that they strongly disagree with.

The women's chess division was created by men though. Probably more conservative men than run the organization today.

In a way it's like affirmative action. And like I've said elsewhere, when there's talk of inclusion, someone must be excluded.

Chess is open to all. Women's chess drives inclusion by exclusion.

If chess didn’t have a women’s league nearly all top level chess would be men so a woman’s league is a way to encourage more women to play chess. It’s the same premise as an all female gaming server or gaming tournament

The categories aren’t male and female, the categories are women and “open”, so anyone who wants to can compete in the open category. I’m disappointed they don’t consider trans women women because they are but chess having a women’s league isn’t that weird

> I’m disappointed they don’t consider trans women women because they are

Not really though. There are only two requirements to being a "trans woman":

1. Be a man

2. Call yourself a woman

That's it. Excluding them from women-only spaces is the only sensible policy if the essential character of such spaces is to be maintained.

I’m not going to even really try to argue about this but that’s not really true, you could say trans people at stage X of a transition can play in the women’s bracket

What would be the significant differences at "stage X of transition"?

If your goal is to filter out people pretending to be trans to play in the women’s bracket that would suffice

Also at some point trans people look nearly identical to straight people so no one would even know the difference without scrutinizing records

The goal is to have women-only spaces, in this case a competitive space. It's essential to filter out men for this purpose, including those who pretend to be women.

Making an exception for the latter if they make some attempt to perform femininity, even if it's a somewhat convincing act, really just undermines the entire point.

It's already open to all