@Springtime
@lemmy.worldYes, I found the participation rate argument very sound.
I wonder what else might be similarly biased?
Two examples come to mind:
Medical test subjects are predominantly if not exclusively male. So any new medication on the market are tailored for the physis and metabolism of a male body while the same medication might have different effects (including side effects) when it comes to women.
Scientific findings are often based on male bias, e.g. the remains of a high status person were declared being male. Only decades later with new technology was it possible to determine it was in fact a women. (See the Ivory man)
But this conversation would deserve its.owm thread. The OP post is regarding how women (cis and transgendered people) are treated in chess. The absurdity of backwards thinking and unfairness when it comes to treating women and men as assigned at birth. I'm not sure, if you missed the part where transgendered men are stripped of their titles when transitioning to male, while people transitioning to female are allowed to keep theirs.
This goes so much deeper. Like another commenter posted: "institutionalized patriarchy"
Equally interesting study comes to the conclusion: gender differences in chess go back on the overrepresentation of men in chess in general
Article on the research: Why Men Rank Higher than Women at Chess (It's Not Biological)
I don't have access to what seems to be the actual study, but maybe you do: Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains
This is a disturbing and insulting decision to both cis-women as well as transgender men and women.
Besides the decision itself, here are some additional "gems" that show its backwardness:
Transgender men who transition after winning women's titles would see those titles "abolished," the federation said, while holding out the possibility of a reinstatement "if the person changes the gender back to a woman."
"If a player has changed the gender from a man into a woman, all the previous titles remain eligible," the federation said.
And, if it wouldn't be so sad, this here would have me roling on the floor. It seems, FIDE has not reached 2023 yet.. (It also sadly shows that even some women are still stuck in the 1950's)
A top global chess official Friday called for more research into whether factors such as hormone levels and physical endurance might have an impact on players' abilities at the male-dominated game. Her comments came after the world chess federation was heavily criticized for its decision to block transgender women from official women's events. (...)
(...)"What is still not clear is if the hormonal levels do influence the competitiveness in chess," Reizniece-Ozola said by video from Latvia's capital, Riga. "There is no serious research or scientific analysis that would prove one or the other way. There are speculations, but no more than that."
One of the reasons why so few women play chess and the reality of what female chess players had and have to fight against:
UK MP Angela Eagle, who was a joint winner of the 1976 British Girls' Under-18 chess championship, said: "There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe men are inherently more able to play than women - I spent my chess career being told women's brains were smaller than men's and we shouldn't even be playing."
"This ban is ridiculous and offensive to women," she added.
Edit: removed redundancy
The article is well worth a read. I didn't want to copy & paste the whole article due to its length, but it goes into different reasons why women tend to have more migraines than men (e.g. estrogen/progesteron levels) and in which cases it might be a better strategy to avoid medication (e.g. birth control) with estrogen.
I had tried to participate one or two iterations ago. Each and every single pixel I tried to contribute was immediately turned into a red pixel by a bot. Took all the fun out of it.
The picture was there and it was clear where they were trying to get to, but the red dots completely destroyed it.
I had enough of it after that. It's not worth it having to wait five minutes to place one pixel just to have it instantly undone again.
Please don't assume a "silent majority" in this matter.
From what I've seen so far, the majority of users who have expressed their opinion have spoken out against federation with Threads. Combine this with the fact that Lemmy's userbase grew substantially with former reddit users who not only are more likely to actively participate on Lemmy than they were on Reddit, but also left that social platform for reasons that mirror some of the sentiments expressed against Threads/Facebook/Meta, I don't think the idea of silent majority applies here.
If you are ok with Threads and all that comes with it, you are free to create an account with them. If you have an Instagram account, you might already have a Threads account automatically created for you by them. On the other hand, if you are a user who does not wish to interact with Threads, you wouldn't have the option to opt out short of finding a new instance that has defederated from Threads.
I find this so fascinating and would love to know more about her life and why and how she came to such a high status in her lifetime.
Alas, as she lived in the bronze age, we probably will never learn the details. Hopefully, some old stories, legends or oral history similar to the Boudica have survived and can be connected to her. It would be so interesting to know more about her. That would be fantastic. I'm really stoked about this find
As much as I root for the Ukraine, this would not be a good move.
It's a shame the US didn't sign the The Convention on Cluster Munitions . It's horrible enough, Russia is using them.
There must be other solutions and weapons the US could provide to the Ukraine that could help them.
Lemmygrad.ml has been de-federated by all other instances. Maybe that's the reason. It's odd though that it works for some communities but not for others.
I have seen in other threads though that some people ran into similar issues of not finding a community with the url, etc. Unfortunately, I can't remember what the responses to that were. You might be able to find those comments if you search for posts regarding issues with search for communities.
Edit I found the following post. Does it help you?
https://lemmy.world/comment/471481
If it still doesn't help you, try to contact your instance admin.
Edit 2 The "subscribe pending" loop has been described by others as a visual bug. If the cancelling and re-subscribing doesn't work, try if you can vote or post in that community even though the status still says pending.