English Blackball Pool Federation

[Signalbox]

The hearing is scheduled for 7th-11th April at Canterbury County Court.

Tribunal Tweets will be following the case…

Live tweeting sessions Abbreviations
J - His Honour Judge Parker
HH - Harriet Haynes, claimant
RW - Robin White, claimant’s barrister
CC - Colman Coyle, claimant's solicitor
EBPF - English Blackball Pool Federation
PT - Paul Thomson, defendant
AG - Anna Goodwin, defendant
SC - Sarah Crowther KC, defendants’ barristers, and
SS - Sapandeep Singh Maini-Thompson
JRL - JR Levins LLP, defendants’ solicitor
JG - James Goodwin, witness for defendant

The original thread has been deleted for “breaking Mumsnet guidelines”. Not sure why but possibly “misgendering” or possibly making it too easy to find the crowdfund @mumsnet it would be good if you could let us know so this thread can stay up. Do we have to pretend that the Claimant is female?

Women get the new, flexible, carbon-fibre poles. Men get the original big wooden stick version.

Nah, it doesn't merit a semi-serious response.

@Retiredfromthere
You are correct - HH has already settled with one of the other organisations.

Handicapping works fine in golf, where a round takes 60+ shots, to allow players of vastly diffrrent levels to have a basis to compete on adjusted score, as they both complete the same course.

In pool at a decent level you can expect a good player to clear up on any given visit, there really doesn't seem to be any bandwidth in a single frame to insert the handicap. Also it is a zero sum game. If A pots all the requisite (which ones depends on format) balls first, they get 100% of the single available point and win the game.

Maybe in a first to x format, you could give a head start?

We could have wildcards from the pub league. Jim from the painters just needs to win a single frame against Jimmy White to win a new table for the pub.

It wouldn't seem serious to me but it could be enteraining

Is a tribunal room quite small? I’m guessing you couldn’t fit a pool table in to demonstrate the difference between male and female in terms of reach etc? Like you sometimes get in a main court.

I often think about that story and Diana Moon Glampers.

I think about this 1970s piece that is sometimes quoted on FWR and the closing line and how successful they’ve been in persuading people to embrace self-declaration is sufficient no matter what the harms to women and the concept of safeguarding.

A more central question is how to relate to other women. When we talk about our hopes and fantasies, it becomes apparent that what we want above all is to be accepted as women, primarily by other women. But will we achieve this by looking for ways in which we share experience with regular women or by developing a unique transvestite consciousness?

Sometimes the second approach seems real militant and proud, at other times it seems a cop-out, accepting the prejudiced view that we're not women, that we're some freaky third sex (or fourth or fifth?). Possibly we can find some light by considering the situation of black women and gay women, who develop black pride and gay pride, but still explore their feelings as women. Think how much more inspiring and beautiful the women's revolution will be when it joyously includes all women. Think of a Holloway demo with transvestite, transsexual and drag-queen women, gay women and heterosexual women, black, yellow, brown and white women, working women, housewives and career women. Certainly, whatever course we take as transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens, we must first destroy the trap wherein regular women set up standards by which they accept or reject us .

https://archive.org/details/cometogetheryear00walt/page/8/mode/2up

I suspect all barristers have blind spots and that trying to bring cases which drive forward your own self-interest, while trying to maintain a massive lie that you and everyone else knows is a lie, probably blunts your wits.

I don’t recall reading that before, @StickItInTheFamilyAlbum . An interesting insight that is still highly relevant, even though these men have progressed so far in upending womanhood and the rights of women.

How telling that in his list of supposed women, he lists himself and all his fellow men first.

The rejection of building a new and genuine niche for himself and those like him, alongside the wishful, but equally rejected fantasy that he might be some third, fourth or fifth sex was ludicrous, but shows how blinkered he kept himself when the reality of his maleness intruded upon his covetous desire to be what he was not.

Nothing but intruding everywhere and taking everything from women will ever be enough.

PriOn1 I’ve been thinking about that 1970s piece because of another reflection that I saw this week.

6 April 1990 was the day that married women became recognised by HMRC as beings – get this! – independent from their husbands, and started having their incomes taxed separately from their spouses’. Of course, many said the rot would set in and it’s true that just a few short years later rape in marriage became a crime, as people started to think that maybe wives’ bodies as well as their earnings were their own and things briefly started looking up all round.

The feminist story has, gosh, had its ups and down since, but I think it’s important to remember and celebrate the wins. Otherwise, you know, you might just lie down and cry instead.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/11/digested-week-its-35-years-since-the-tax-man-conceded-married-women-were-independent-beings

So, if Press for Change was active near that time and the GRA was 2004, the newly recognised rights to control our own bodies and earnings, to move towards equity, were already being undermined by the drive to destroy sex based rights and women as a recognised legal category.

Less than 15 years.

Yep

anyone who can’t see that men who enjoy role playing as women have disordered and highly sexist views about women is delusional. The ‘old fashioned transsexuals who were on our side ’ trope is utter bobbins. Those men despised women just as much as the current bunch, they were just a bit more circumspect about it due to the position of the Overton window at the time.

and look, men can despise women, I can’t stop them. Just don’t go thinking men acting out a sexist fantasy are or ever were on our side

How telling that in his list of supposed women, he lists himself and all his fellow men first.

That was my immediate reaction to reading this. See who's most important here.

anyone who can’t see that men who enjoy role playing as women have disordered and highly sexist views about women is delusional. The ‘old fashioned transsexuals who were on our side ’ trope is utter bobbins.

Agreed.

Which is why as soon as it hits scrutiny, it folds. Because it's not just normal sexism, it's sexism on steroids.

Look at these idiots having to pretend that men aren't stronger than women and that altho bravely teetering under their own bone weight, roundly beating women in pool finals is completely inexplicable.

As an aside, I see that even then, they were making the racist analogy with black women and the homophobic analogy with lesbians who nevertheless manage to see themselves as women.

My main thought on having reached the stage on Friday of 'why don’t we handicap some specific players' ie the ones who have an advantage for a reason that any small child can recognise within a couple of nanoseconds was that, if this was a TV show, it’s just jumped the shark.

I do look forward to seeing Mondo doing the pole vault with a comedy rubber pole, though. Or certain canoeists with a small hole bored in the bottom of their canoe, perhaps, so they have to bale while paddling?

I hesitate to even mention this, but handicapping does quite often happen in amateur comps in pool. Matches might have a format like, first to win 15 frames, Player A starts on scratch, Player B on -2 or -4 or whatever. This makes obvious sense in an amateur context. But pro sport does not work like that. And who gets a handicap, and how much, is, I believe, determined by stats, like the proportion of games in which the player successfully clears up off the break,

A trampoline for the high jump, travelator going forwards for women in races and backwards for the men. Flippers vs pyjamas in the swimming. There's lots of fun to be had here.

I saw that. I was wondering if it was a typo. If not, I suspect the judge hadn’t yet remembered or settled into the performance/ dissonance of ‘I’m supposed to refer to this person as a woman’.

If it wasn’t a typo, it is interesting that the judge didn’t get a reproach. I don’t know if the camera caught any expression of deep wounding at reality being referenced. As we know, correctly sexing someone must the most egregious offence anyone could ever commit.

Or perhaps it went unnoticed, because reality tends not to jar…

There was a reference to some sort of disturbance. Do we know what it was all about? These are the final words of the judge yesterday.

J: Am very grateful to legal teams for the presentations. Everyone in court has behaved very well even if not always those outside.

Just got to the end of the thread and the open justice substack. It transpires that HH has a GRS which RMW refers to at the end of his oral submissions.

This makes more sense of the legal arguments now.

RMW is asserting that HH has been discriminated on the grounds of the GRA, (for all purposes) and that the comparator should be female.

Futherance as a legal female HH is in the correct category of ladies, whilst men should not be allowed as they are stronger Wheras TIM on meds are weaker and have no advantage.

Whereas SC in defence is saying no the correct PC is sex, and the correct comparator is male.

Thats why the Ruling at the Supreme Court will be significant in this case.

Still think RMW case is flimsy and again a good argument to remove attachment of the GRA to EQA.

think i have it happy to be corrected.

If HH has a GRC, that puts him in a small minority of TW. But does this mean that any ruling made here won't be applicable to TW in general, just people with a GRC? I wonder if HH's opponent in that final the other day has a GRC?

But RMW's problem is that s195 of the EA2010 allows discrimination on the grounds of GR or Sex if the sport is gender-affected and you have to exclude for the sake of safety and/or fair competition (and something else which I can't remember!). So you can still exclude all males from a women's competition. That's why HH's case claims that pool is not a gender-affected sport and that excluding males, rather than relying on a testosterone suppression regime, is a disproportionate action.

RMW is trying to get the judge to just breeze past the fact that HH is male. All RMW's arguments depended on the judge accepting from the off that HH is female, not a male claiming to be a woman. That's the only way any of it can stand up, afics.

Intriguing thought.

If the judge accepts that a GRC makes HH eligible, wouldn’t the GRA rules that are rather opaque but extremely biased towards the wishes of men who identify as women around not being able to ask to see/disclose a GRC make this form of eligibility tricky to police?

I guess sporting bodies would have to require a falsified updated Birth Certificate as afaik the only way to change that would be via a GRC whereas all other forms of id have had their reliability undermined by the unofficial introduction of self id.

Allowing people to change the sex marker on driving licences, birth certificiates, etc (or replace them with an 'X') seems an absolutely crazy thing to have allowed, and yet it's happened, in many countries and territories. It's batshit, and a really bad idea for plenty of obvious reasons.