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Hm, are you pretty knowledgeable about competitive chess, and, if so, do you know if there's any controversy about transwomen competing in the women's division? I wonder if it would create a videogame speedrunner-like situation where basically every last one of the top "woman" speedrunners are male (I'm sure high correlation with autism would play a part, as well as the sex, though I'd also guess that high level chess or speedrunning tends to be disproportionately autistic, both male and female).
I've heard off-hand that men also dominate "sports" like darts or billiards/pool/snooker, despite there being minimal advantage from physical strength in those sports. If that's true, I wonder how much of that's biological in terms of men being innately better at geometry versus biological in terms of men having greater penchant for obsessing over some meaningless task until they achieve mastery versus biological in terms of men having greater incentive to become known for being great at something.
Unsurprisingly, there was some controversy.
First, some organization. The primary international organization that is involved in many of the highest-level chess tournaments is FIDE. Since I know the most about US concerns and TheMotte is still somewhat heavily US, I'll also discuss the US Chess Federation, which operates, unsurprisingly, within the US. Some international events are directly organized by FIDE. Many times, FIDE will 'rate' an event run by some other organization. USCF also does their own rating system for their own events, but FIDE may rate them, too. That is, USCF hosts a variety of events, and some of them are not FIDE rated, while others are. What it means to be 'rated' is that the organization will take the results of the event and use them to update their list of ratings for players (which is meant to be a measure of how good they are). USCF may host an event that is not FIDE rated, and just your USCF rating will update. USCF may also host an event that is FIDE rated, and then both USCF and FIDE ratings change.
The perception of FIDE is that it has many institutional connections to Russia and similar countries. The Soviet Union used to be a powerhouse in international chess, and they still have a fair amount of pull in the organization. The current president of FIDE is Russian. This is not strictly determinative of what they will choose to do (for example, at least one top-level Russian player who was an outspoken supporter of the Ukraine war was banned, and other Russians have been playing "without a flag" since the war started), but FIDE does not necessarily lean in the direction of US politics. In 2023, FIDE enacted a policy on transgender players. It was controversial, and I'll just let chess.com describe the controversy. USCF, on the other hand, had enacted a much more permissive policy that simply accepted self-identification. My understanding is that if USCF runs an event that is FIDE rated, the FIDE rules control.
There is, of course, controversy, but I think there are at least a couple factors that make it less likely to come up as much. First is that the people who are most likely to be upset about it are in the US (or perhaps in other countries that have more US-levels of pro-trans, and perhaps their own national federations have taken similar stances to USCF), and there's very little point in complaining about/to USCF, since USCF has enacted their own, more permissive policy. They would have to complain about/to FIDE. And, well, everyone seems to have something to complain about with FIDE, so it's hard to have this one move very far up the list. FIDE is also viewed as being pretty hard to influence, and so especially with such significant Russia/Russia-like connections, many folks probably think that it would be basically shouting into the void. They're probably not going to change FIDE's mind. The best chance would be to prop up a competing organization, and if that's going to happen, it's probably going to be primarily because of other grievances, so a pro-trans person may just not bother emphasizing the trans thing and just latch on to other criticisms/reasons to split, but holding hopes that if such an effort is successful, maybe there's a chance that whatever replacement organization would be more likely to be more pro-trans.
The second factor is, frankly, the vibe shift, where it seems like trans stuff has just been getting less sway in general. It's not that there's no controversy, just that it doesn't seem to be getting quite as much attention.
I'm not really aware of any high-rated male players transitioning and then winning some or a bunch of highly-respected women's events.
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