Haynes v Blackball Pool Federation is back on - this time at the High Court

I agree with this. Neither is ultimately determinative, but permission to JR is a far rarer beast.

Can I just add that the County Court is a very low level tribunal and while permission to appeal to the High Court is significant for the parties it’s not as noteworthy as permission to proceed to a JR by the Court of Appeal overriding the decision of a High Court Judge.

Presumably they all feel the same way about the Hampstead Ponds case, which has also been given permission to proceed by a different judge after failing in an earlier hearing.

I think here they're meaning just plain old women. I think it comes down to whether SH's protected characteristics of "sex" is deemed to have changed with his "transition". When going through the gender reassignment process does one simply acquire the protected characteristic of gender reassignment or does one also change ones protected characteristic of sex. Per FWS I think the answer is unequivocally the former, not least because the protected characteristic of sex cannot change as it throws up a whole bunch of inconsistencie.

From that it follows that SH needs to be compared to an individual who shares all his protected characteristics other than gender reassignment ie a man who is not undertaking the process of gender reassignment. Wonder how many of them are competing in the women's pool tournament.

The other difficulty with this is that the fact he had the PC of GR had no bearing at all on the decision. The fact that he is a male, did.

:D quite. I was a little worried, but then...well, its not an unpopular view, is it?

I actually had to double check I hadn't posted this 😁I think it is fair to say that expressing the view AR is regarded as a loose cannon does not out oneself (except as a member of the legal profession perhaps).

Ground 1: [J16-17]. The Court erred in its approach to section 13 of the EA in that it failed to consider the mental processes of the Defendants. The Judge ought to have analysed the evidence on whether HH having a protected characteristic – GR, significantly influenced the prohibition decision. Had the Judge done so the answer was GR did significantly influence the decision. There was no evidence that GR women had any competitive advantage over non GR women.

What what are non GR women? Are they female women or TIM who haven't had SRS?

"Ms Haynes said: “It’s tough to put into words how unfair this whole situation is."

Totally oblivious to the irony of his words, he's a cheater and a liar and yet he's claiming he's the victim of 'unfairness'.

He's posting his arguments on reddit today. Obviously he's being fawned over.

I don't see how anyone could rule that TIMs don't have an unfair advantage when two TIMs were competing in the final of a women's pool tournament. I mean what are the chances? We're told they only make up a tiny tiny proportion of the population so isn't it strange that two TIMs just happened to float to the top in a women's pool tournament.

The judge failed to consider the "mental processes" of the federation and that they were significantly influenced in their decision to exclude trans-identifying men as they were in some way unfairly discriminatory.

Presumably it will be difficult to prove discrimination against the PC of GR if the federation includes trans-identified females (which I imagine they do).

Is controversial drawn from the same legal lexicon as novel, ingenious and imaginitive?

I really want to ask that poster if they think they're a frog. Please let me.

Sex is not immutable because American green frogs? I see...

It appears he was given permission by Richie J.

I don't want to out myself too much, but it is far to say that Richie J has made a number of controversial decisions since appointment, as is known to be something of a loose cannon by the bar and bench.

The fact he was given permission by him is pretty meaningless as to the merits of the case.

He’s posted on Reddit about the case. https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/s/gaWmrg77Ts

Although the headline is wrong.

Yeah, they all do it, I said on a thread yesterday; the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph, the Mail...

Reported in the Telegraph

https://archive.ph/oI7uA

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/snooker/2026/04/03/snooker-bans-transgender-players-from-womens-game/

Although the headline is wrong.

It's just like the TRA toilet arguments, where the women's facility shapeshifts from being necessary and effective to being futile and pointless.
"We have to use the Ladies' to be safe from transphobic men" but also "There's no point in keeping us out of the Ladies' because any man who wants to attack will just follow you in anyway".

Right. If it's established that there's no advantage for men then the whole separate women's category becomes unlawful discrimination against (all) men and vice versa, and the various sporting bodies would have to abandon any kind of separation by sex.

If they're arguing that cue sports aren't affected by sex, then surely that's an argument against needing single sex competitions in cue sports at all? Not for having them (on what grounds?) and then allowing a select few males, and only those few, to identify into them. It doesn't add up.

The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association updated their policy yesterday to female only in the women’s matches, yesterday. I wonder if this is going to affect this in anyway considering one of the arguments is :

Cue sports are precision sports thus not affected by power/sex.

I think the case for sex differences impacting play in pool got a significant boost just before this judgement when the final of a women’s event saw two TiMs facing each other (they must have been gutted). Hopefully the appeals judge will be sane and will award costs against HH. The clarity of the IOC ruling should also help here. But yes, it really isn’t fair to the Blackball pool federation. I hope they reopen their crowdfunder.

Thank you.

Did you read Naomi Cunningham's blog article discussing this? It's excellent.

Here's the relevant excerpt and link:

Stilitz then says that the judgment in For Women Scotland had thrown what had been a fairly stable status quo into disarray. It is true that “Stonewall Law” had created a widespread and complacent misapprehension that the protected characteristic of gender reassignment operated as an access all areas pass. That exact argument was made by counsel for the appellant in Croft (more on that later). It was rejected. The finding of the Court of Appeal, whatever else may be said about obiter comments in the judgment, was that protection from gender reassignment discrimination does not confer an entitlement to access single-sex spaces.

That depended on the unsupported claim that the correct comparator to determine whether a trans-identifying man had suffered gender reassignment discrimination was a “non-trans woman”. That claim should have been laid to rest long ago by the judgment of the High Court in Green, but the myth had continued to be widely promulgated, accepted and, to the detriment of women, applied.

Stilitz then says this:

At various points in the judgment, the Supreme Court was at pains to say they weren’t cutting, cutting back trans rights. They weren’t purporting to rule on wider questions, in particular about single-sex spaces. Interestingly, in an interview with The Times in September 2025, Lord Hodge was very keen to, to try and clarify that point. He said that, “The case before the court involving Scotland had nothing to do with how or where single-sex spaces should be created. These points weren’t argued before us, we were not there to decide points that were not put to us or were not raised in the course of argument.”

But there is an important difference between what Lord Hodge said the court wasn’t purporting to rule on — how or where single-sex spaces should be created — and what Stilitz interprets that as meaning — wider questions, in particular about single-sex spaces. The judgment does not say when single-sex spaces should be created, no doubt because the Act doesn’t concern itself with that question, and the judgment is about the interpretation of the Act. But it is shot through with consideration of what the various permissions in the Act to create single-sex spaces and services mean; the unworkability of those permissions if sex is taken to mean “certificated sex” is central to the court’s reasoning. It is bizarre to suggest, as Stilitz does, that the judgment has nothing to say about how single-sex services and spaces can lawfully be operated: the judgment is clear that when the EqA permits single-sex provision, what it permits is single-sex provision on the basis of actual sex, not certificated sex.

Croft v Royal Mail
Stilitz then touches on Croft v Royal Mail, which he says “held in that case was that once one reached a certain stage of gender reassignment, the claimant was entitled to be treated as a woman, was entitled to use the women’s toilets”.
That is not what the Court of Appeal held in Croft. What the court held was that there was nothing unlawful about the employer’s refusal to permit a trans-identifying man to use the women’s facilities in the workplace in circumstances where he had only just embarked on his “transition”. It is true that the judgment proceeds on the basis that there will be a certain “stage of transition” (evidently meaning hormone treatment and/or surgery) at which a trans-identifying man “becomes a woman and entitled to the same facilities as other women .”

The Court of Appeal in Croft was having to work out for itself, before the GRA 2004 had been passed, what the legal consequences of “transition” might be in terms of access to opposite-sex facilities. Its answer was that pure self-identification was in any event not sufficient, although it anticipated that some degree (which it did not attempt to define) of medical and/or surgical modification would ultimately entitle an individual to access opposite-sex facilities. Before any other court had to attempt a definition of the “stage” of transition that would be requisite, parliament enacted a comprehensive regime for gender recognition in the GRA 2004, which (foreshadowing the judgment of the ECtHR in AP, Garçon and Nicot v France (Application Nos 79885/12, 52471/13 and 52596/13) (unreported) 6 April 2017) created a regime for legal recognition of “transition” that was not dependent on any medical or surgical preconditions beyond a diagnosis of dysphoria. As was perhaps not widely appreciated at the time, but is now clear from FWS, that regime did not provide the holders of gender recognition certificates with any right of access to opposite-sex facilities.

How, in these circumstances, it can be suggested that the judgment of the Court of Appeal in Croft is anything but a dead letter is a mystery.

https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2026/03/25/podcasting-and-partisanship/

There's a thread on it here on the board, which is where I found it. Very useful.