Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

...chess gender issues re-surface. Sunday Times writer Dominic Lawson (2000-rated chess player, ex-president of the English Chess Federation, son of 1980s Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel and, as far as I know, no relation to any of my readers) shows he's an avid reader of my blog.

Regular readers will recall I posted about women in chess. I think Dominic clearly read it, because today he wrote about the very issues I raised: participation of women in chess, top women players not reaching men's levels, quoting Hou Yifan as exemplar but also as a sceptic of women's lack of capability to sustain the physical demands of chess, etc etc. His column's starting point was a 17yo German who recently won the national girls' under-18 tournament: Nora Heidermann was born a boy but self-identifies as a girl.

So just when I thought I'd put the male/female chess issue to bed by suggesting that women-only tournaments were holding back the development of the top women players, a new dimension raises its ugly head. Lawson takes the opposite view to mine, quoting the example of Scrabble, where 85% of recreational players are women but the upper tiers are dominated by men [so?]. The authority he quotes is Carole Hooven's T: The Story of Testosterone in which she concludes that "men are more disposed to the intense and passionate obsessiveness, shutting out all external activities and interests required to become the world's best over the 64 squares".

Or, as he quotes chess Grandmaster Hein Donner: "What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a wordless snuffling and scrabbling around in a bottomless pit". Yep, that us boys.

I'll be snuffling in my bottomless pit again tomorrow. Happy Sunday.