Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport

by Jennifer Shahade

  A practical obstacle to Angela’s transformation was financing her sex-change operation. To remove her phallus, she had to save for three years, working overtime as a cook. After saving approximately $10,000 for the operation and related drugs and therapy, Angela traveled to Montreal, where her surgery was scheduled.

  The operation lasted two hours. Angela recalls, “That day was the happiest day of my life.” A Billy Idol lyric from “White Wedding”—“It’s a nice day to start again”—played repeatedly in Angela’s head.

  Born into a conservative family, Angela tells me, “I was brought up on the idea that you don’t just accept everything. No one ever talked about ‘celebrating diversity.’” Her siblings (one sister and two brothers) and her late father did not support her transformation, but when her father was dying of cancer in 1998, Angela accepted the responsibility to take care of her ill mother, Mary, with whom she now lives. “When my father was on his deathbed, I promised to take care of Mom,” she recalls. “And I will keep my word.” Initially her mother was upset with Angela, but gradually began to accept her. Angela knew her mother was ready to love her as she was after receiving her forty-second birthday card. Her mother wrote, “To my daughter.”

  In San Antonio, Angela has settled into two stable, part-time jobs: teaching chess and working as a real-estate advisor. Teaching chess is Angela’s favorite: “I love to see the light in my students’ eyes and realize I reached someone.” Angela’s students, who range from six to twelve years old, sometimes ask her, “Are you a man or a woman?” Struggling to answer the awkward question is worth it for Angela:

  “I think it’s good for young people to understand that some people are born different.”

  The United States Chess Federation has considered Angela a female player since 1998, but she assures me that until her operation, she would not have played as female—“It wouldn’t have felt right.” The USCF began to communicate with Angela, who was suddenly eligible to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Championship. Though some state delegates argued with Angela’s participation in women’s events, the USCF calmly accepted her changed status. According to Angela, Tim Redman, the president of USCF at the time, was well informed of precedent-setting cases such as that of Reneé Richards (formerly Richard Raskin), a tennis player who was barred from playing in the 1976 U.S. Open by the United States Tennis Association, because she could not pass the chromosome test. Richards—urged on by fans and supporters—fought the decision, resulting in a yearlong battle that Reneé finally won in the Supreme Court, clearing the way for her to play in the 1977 U.S. Open.

  Angela has not yet qualified for the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship, though this is one of her major goals. Her rating places her between the top twenty and thirty women in the country, so her chances to qualify are high. The new qualifying procedures for the U.S. Championship, set up by the American Foundation for Chess in 2002, require Angela to earn her spot in preliminary tournaments. These tournaments are never in Texas, and Angela does not have the money to travel to Philadelphia or Las Vegas, two frequent sites for the qualifiers. Angela is now most active in e-mail chess, where she often juggles more than fifty games at once. In e-mail chess, the length of time between each move ranges from one day to two weeks, so games last anywhere from a month to a year.

  Some of Angela’s chess peers thought that her sex change would affect her play. One chess buddy warned her, “Your rating will plummet after you change your sex.” Angela tells me she sees no difference between her style today and her style as Tony. In her first tournament game after her operation, Angela crushed a master—in twenty-nine moves. Selby Anderson, a friend of Angela’s and a chess master, said the transition was “a surprise, but not entirely out of character. I think she enjoyed being a lightning rod.” The most difficult thing for Selby was “to stop calling her Tony.”

  Though she is talkative and candid, I gather that Angela is lonely and feels a little out of place in both the chess world and San Antonio. “The person I’m closest to is my mother. I don’t have a lot of friends, though my closest are from chess—we have a point of reference so we can all relate.” After hearing about Angela’s operation, her ex-wife had a nervous breakdown, feeling that she must have been homosexual to spend so many years with Angela/Tony. Angela is not optimistic about her future romantic prospects: “At my age, it is hard enough to find a life companion, but with my condition I suspect it is nearly impossible.” However, the operation did leave Angela multi-orgasmic. “After the procedure I was able to experience more pleasure than I could as a man.”

  The misconception that irritates Angela most is the frequent confusion that arises between gender and sexuality. That Angela wanted to change her sex did not mean that she wanted to date men. She changed from a lesbian woman living in a man’s body to a lesbian woman living in a woman’s body. But many friends did not understand that, assuming that she changed her sex so that she could sleep with men. One woman even told Angela, “If you want to find a man, you better stop acting so intelligent.”

  Angela is suspicious of men. After the operation, the first thing she did was look to make sure “it was gone.” Sometimes her rhetoric devolves into absurd invectives. “Ninety percent of men ought to be flushed down the toilet immediately,” she tells me, adding that “the other ten percent are very good people.” Angela said that, living as a man for thirty-five years, she heard things that men only say amongst each other. “Many men really do think that women are stupid,” she told me. I press her for details, but she refused: “If I told you, Jennifer, you’d want to become lesbian.”

  Angela is not active in any transsexual or transgender activist groups. “Being a transsexual is not my life,” she says. Though she reads voraciously on topics like religion and history, she rarely reads about feminism or sexuality. Angela considers herself a feminist even though “many male-to-female transsexuals are not feminists and still have a rigid conception of what a woman or man should be.” Angela is happy to educate the curious, but she does not want to spend the rest of her life thinking or talking about her gender. “I took care of my problem, so that I wouldn’t have to think about it all the time.” Angela is so much happier after her operation that she swears if she ever became rich, she would set up a fund to finance sex-change operations for people who could not afford them.

  Angela, often surprised by the reactions of her friends in the chess world, could not have guessed who would be supportive. “At least I know who my real friends are.” Angela was shocked when one of her most liberal friends told her she was “sick and perverted.” The friends who touched Angela the most were the ones who focused on her struggle, rather than on their relationship to her. One friend from the chess world looked at Angela and said, “Oh my god, you must have been in so much pain.”

  In San Antonio the population is conservative. “Many people here only know about transvestites from The Jerry Springer Show. They lack exposure—it’s as if I’m the first person they met who was different. Hundreds of people, once they get to know me, say, ‘You’re not like I thought.’” It is Angela’s belief and experience that people will often open their minds to her if she is patient with them. When Angela worked at a Mexican restaurant, one cook called her “it” within earshot. Angela turned to him and said, “For you to call me ‘it’ feels like it would feel to you if I called you the ‘n-word.’” After a couple of weeks of awkward silence, the same cook began to ask her questions. During one of their conversations, “He looked at me, pulled up his sleeve, pointed at his black arm, and declared, ‘We are among the unfortunate.’” Angela was moved that she had made a person who ridiculed her understand the parallels between racism and the persecution she had faced.

  According to Angela, specifying gender is not an effective way to classify people. In her view, gender expression lies on a flexible continuum, pointing out commonplace examples. “When a woman wears pants or when a man cries in public—these are transgressions of traditional roles,�
�� and so, concludes Angela, “if you really think about it, we’re are all a little transgender.”

  13

  Worst to First

  The essence of chess is thinking about what chess is.

  — Grandmaster David Bronstein

  In the spring of 2004, Irina Krush and I were invited to the Women’s World Championship in Chess City, Russia. When I told my friends that I was going to Chess City, they thought I was joking, renaming my destination “Chesstonia.” But this was for real. Irina and I were among sixty-four of the best female chessplayers in the world contesting the world title, up for grabs for the first time since 2001. The tournament would be held near Elista, the capital city of Kalmykia, one of eighty-nine semi-autonomous regions in Russia. Kalmykia is led by the president of FIDE, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has taken his double presidency seriously, building a city in which to play chess on the outskirts of Elista. Since 1998, when the prestigious Olympiad was held there, Chess City has been a common site for world-class tournaments.

  I usually love traveling, but I was not thrilled to visit Russia again. I had developed an irrational fear of the country two and a half years before when I was there in the dead of winter for the Women’s World Championship. The first day I arrived, I walked around Red Square smiling, excited to be in Moscow. A tall, blond Russian laughed at me and asked if I was American. I asked how he knew and he said because of my smiling, which seemed demented to him. I had not brought sufficiently warm clothing, and knew only enough Russian to order food and read street names. There were things I liked about Moscow—the energy, the subways, the art museums, and the circus. Still, at the end of the tournament, walking through the security gate, I was happy to be going home.

  The customs agent asked me where my visa was. I replied that it was inside my passport. She told me it wasn’t and said that I should check my bags. After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, I still couldn’t find it. She told me I would not be allowed to leave Moscow until I found it. I began to panic. I asked if I could pay a special fee to leave. She said no. I missed my plane, still looking for the godforsaken piece of paper. After searching every crevice of my bag, I gave up and took a cab back to the city center. I spent the next four days waiting in lines at the police station, travel agencies, and photo shops in order to compile the mountain of paperwork required to obtain a new visa.

  I relived all this four days before leaving for Elista when applying for my new visa at the Russian Embassy, located in uptown Manhattan. On my way from the diner where I had been filling out my application to the visa office it began to pour, soaking through my bag. When I tried to hand in my damp form, the visa officer screamed at me and called the application unacceptable, sending me to the back of the line to fill out a new one.

  I traveled to Russia with Irina and Pascal, her boyfriend and second during the tournament. I was glad to be with friends and also figured that Irina’s fluency with the language would make my second trip to Russia smoother than the first.

  When the three of us stepped off the plane in Elista, after the thirty-hour-long journey from New York City, a smiling woman dressed in a purple robe served us Kalmyk tea, black tea with milk and salt. She draped a gold-trimmed white scarf around my neck and handed me a single rose. Irina and I were besieged by interviewers. It seemed as though we had arrived in the fairytale land of Chess City, Kalmykia, where women chessmasters are treated like queens. “[Gather] all the flowers of Kalmykia for Chess Queens” read posters all over the city. As it turned out, Elista was another world from Moscow. Kalmyk people have Asian features, their ancestry most closely linked with Mongolians. It is one of the few areas of Russia in which Buddhism is the predominant religion. One of the poorest areas of Russia, it is also thought to be one of the most hospitable.

  Chess City is a fenced-off suburb of Elista with nothing much but look-alike cottages and an empty bar called Café Rook. I felt out of my element in the remote surroundings. During tournaments, I like to jog, play basketball, and take long walks, but Chess City was so isolated that there was nowhere to walk except in half-mile circles.

  We certainly didn’t have to worry about our safety. There were about three security guards for each player, most of whom stood around smoking cigarettes and chatting all day. “What’s your name?” they would ask me as I walked to the dining or playing hall, “Jennifer?” “Jennifer Lopez!” they shouted, followed by uproarious laughter.

  Irina, Pascal, and I shared a large cottage, with a Western-style kitchen and bathroom. At first I thought our accommodations were simply comfortable, but then I learned how extraordinary they were compared to those of the residents of rural Kalmykia. Irina, Pascal, and I traveled to a small town, Yashkol, to meet some Kalmyk players. We were treated like celebrities. We visited a school and were mobbed for autographs and given gifts by Kalmyk children who had never met foreigners. After playing chess with some local players, the three of us were invited to the mayor’s house for lunch. Our gracious hosts had prepared a splendid lunch of fresh meat—“the sheep was killed this morning”—cheese, pirogis, and vodka. As we ate and drank, guests and hosts were all called on to give the customary lengthy toasts. Our hosts lavished praise on us—“I can’t wait to read about you in the papers in the coming years”—while Irina, Pascal, and I declared in turn our affection for Kalmykia, chess, and the most delicious pirogis of our lives. Despite the joyous pitch of the afternoon, we saw that the conditions of even the most powerful in rural Kalymkia were rough. The rooms in houses were tiny and there was no bathroom—even in the office of the mayor—only a rancid outhouse that seemed not to have been cleaned for months. Most Kalmyks, I later learned, do not have electricity.

  After that afternoon I understood that, in contrast to the rest of the region, Chess City was a place of luxury. A few weeks after the tournament, a New York Times article, “Where Chess Is King and the People Are Pawns,”1 described the chess palace in which we played as a “glassed-in biosphere on Mars, where the most brilliant minds of chess compete for diamond crowns. For miles around, 300,000 live in poverty in the barren plains.” Upon walking just meters outside of Chess City, protesters pass out fliers in Russian and English denouncing Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and the chess championship. Awkwardly translated excerpts include: “The citizens of our republic take the financial consequences due to these chess festivals,” “The majority of the children cannot eat to their heart’s content while you are taking pleasure by the concerts of the poverty artists.” Though Ilyumzhinov claims that chess is a religion and a gift to humanity, he seems to believe it is a gift reserved only for the elite. Ordinary Kalymk citizens need special permission to visit Chess City, and the only spectators at the event were the friends, families, and coaches of the players.

  As intrigued as I was by the politics and history of Kalmykia, I had to shift my thoughts to my first match. Two weeks before the start of the tournament I had learned that my opponent in Elista would be a young Georgian, Nana Dzagnidze. Busy with coaching my students, I had little time to prepare in America. Settled in Elista three days before the start of the tournament, I began to study Nana’s games.

  The other reason we decided to arrive early in Elista was to adjust to the nine-hour time difference, a change that affects some players more drastically than others. Irina can sleep soundly regardless of the time or location. Red-eyed and miserable on planes, I am jealous of Irina, who can go into R.E.M. as soon as the plane takes off. Pascal and I have more trouble adjusting, so the night after we arrived in Elista, we stopped at the bar in the Chess Palace, hoping a glass of wine would help put us to sleep. One of the most active and popular women players, Bulgarian Antoaneta Stefanova, was there with her trainer and compatriot, GM Vladimir Georgiev. Antoaneta had just come from the Dominican Republic and looked tan and happy as she smoked a cigarette and sipped a whisky on the rocks. Chatting and drinking with them relaxed my nerves a bit.

  Two days after settling in, we attended the opening ceremony, which was
held in a field in the middle of nowhere; the bus to take us there was two hours late, and the drive itself took an hour. All the players were grumpy and hungry by the time we arrived. There were traditional Kalmyk dances, speeches, the Russian and FIDE national anthems, and Kalmyk models dressed in custom-designed black-and-white-checkered dresses. “Why don’t they give each player such a dress in their own size?” wondered Elisabeth Paehtz. “That would be a really good present.”

  Humpy Koneru, the Indian grandmaster, who was the top-seeded player in the tournament, was invited up to the stage to determine the colors for each board of the tournament. Without cracking a smile, the serious teenager drew the colors: each odd-numbered player (which included me) would have the white pieces in the first game. As soon as I learned this, my mind started to focus on the next day’s game.

  The next morning, my sleeping schedule was still a bit out of whack—I woke up just before seven. Too early. The round was not until two. Too many hours to kill before game time. In preparing, I find it important to strike a balance between relaxation and study. Studying for six hours before a two o’clock start is dangerous, because it’s important to save energy for the game. On the other hand, I am occasionally mad at myself for studying too little, especially when a position I only glanced at appears on the board. More often, I tend to overprepare, sometimes looking at games on my laptop until minutes before start-time. In Elista, I studied the Najdorf, the dynamic opening that my eighteen-year-old opponent had played since she was ten years old.