John Oliver, the British comedian whose viral rants have made him an unlikely standard-bearer for liberal America, broadcast his latest sophomoric skit on transgender athletes late on Sunday night. It was full of his usual fallacies: that biological males depriving women of sporting glory was somehow analogous to taller basketball players competing against shorter ones, or to Michael Phelps dominating swimming despite being “half-dolphin”. And yet the timing could not have been worse. For at the very moment this segment dropped, portraying sport’s trans scandal as somehow a niche issue, a women’s pool final in Wigan was being contested by two trans-identifying males.
The contrast was grimly revealing. On one side of the Atlantic, a comic preaching to the converted in his New York studio was demeaning the integrity of female sport for clicks. On the other, each woman at that pool tournament was feeling the painful cost of her spineless administrators sacrificing her right to fair sport on the altar of gender ideology.
Whether or not you regard pool as a fringe pursuit is immaterial. This is a category issue: sports are organised by sex to reflect the fact that, in physiology, men and women are immutably different, with profound implications for fairness. The travesty of Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith facing off for a female title despite both being born male sends a stark signal: that if you continue to enable this erosion of fairness in the name of inclusion, the last people standing in women’s sport will be men.
Women at the vanguard have been warning of this moment for years. They were even doing so in Wigan on Sunday, with the Manchester branch of the Women’s Rights Network holding up “Save Women’s Sports” banners to highlight what was about to unfold. And now we see the logical endgame, where Haynes and Smith combine to render the very notion of a women’s competition meaningless.
For Oliver and his ilk, the questions are simple. How much more of this injustice are you content to sit back and mock? How much longer will you delude yourselves that it is not happening when the ultimate rebuke to that claim is staring you in the face?
Mediocre men annexing wins
Trans activists pretend that no male advantage in pool exists. Try telling that to Lynne Pinches, who in 2023 forfeited her chance of a national championship by refusing to play Haynes, later turning down a professional contract on the grounds she was at a competitive disadvantage.
Pinches has spelt out the rationale: that men are taller, able to reach further, and with longer fingers necessary to bridge when the balls are clustered. Her arguments are substantiated by Dave Alciatore, a master instructor and author of The Illustrated Principles of Pool and Billiards, who writes: “Men generally have more strength and faster-twitch muscles that make it easier to execute many shots – especially power shots like the break and power draw – ...
