This is what the endgame of trans ideology looks like: an all-male final of a women’s pool championship.
Last night, the UK’s Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2 in Wigan had its final match. This women’s pool event wouldn’t ordinarily have grabbed the headlines, except for one curious detail: this year, there were no women in the final. It was played between two transgender-identified men – Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith. They had defeated four female opponents each before making it to the final, which Haynes ultimately won. Broadcaster Piers Morgan took to X to call the incident ‘preposterous’ and ‘cheating bullshit’. Meanwhile, former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies described it as ‘bloody ridiculous and grossly wrong in every way’.
To make matters worse, Haynes already has multiple women’s championship titles under his (sizeable) belt. In 2023, he prevailed in the Women’s Champion of Champions final in Prestatyn, Wales, not because he outperformed the other players, but because his opponent refused to compete against him. Lynne Pinches, an actual woman, forfeited her shot at the national title. She said that ‘whenever you play a transgender player, even if you win, it doesn’t make any difference because, in your heart, you know it’s unfair’. Haynes won the match by default.
While it’s true that, in pool, the difference between men and women might not be as pronounced as in other, more physically demanding sports, men do still have some biological advantages. These differences – though hotly disputed by delusional trans activists – are obvious to anyone with eyes. The chief issue being that anyone who has gone through male puberty will have, on average, a much wider wingspan and be much taller than someone who hasn’t. As Pinches has explained, ‘they have a longer reach, and a lot of them are taller than us’, making it easier for men to make shots with greater power and speed.
The embarrassing incident between Pinches and Haynes led various pool associations – including the Ultimate Pool Group, the World Blackball Pool Federation (WBPF) and the English Blackball Pool Federation (EBPF) – to restrict participation in the women’s category to ‘naturally born women’. While Ultimate Pool and the WBPF later reversed this decision, the EBPF chose to keep its ban in place.
The irrefutable arguments around fairness do not move Haynes in the slightest, it seems. Last year, he announced that he would be taking legal action against the EBPF, alleging discrimination on the grounds of his ‘protected characteristic’ of being trans. He said that the ‘trans ban’ had left him feeling ‘stunned and saddened’ that his ‘hobby and passion, which meant so much to me, was taken from me practically overnight’. He showed less sympathy for the women who he, by participating in their competitions, was robbing of their hobby and passion. After all, while Haynes can simply up and move back to the men’s category and stand a good chance at successfully competing there, female pool players have nowhere else to go. They are expected to throw away all their training and hard work to spare men’s egos.
The women who have dedicated their time to playing pool deserve a fair shot. And they deserve to see two actual women fighting it out for a women’s championship. The only balls involved here should be on the table.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
