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?

Isn't it great. The journalist, Oliver Brown, has been writing powerfully about all this for some years and giving women a voice.

It does seem to me to, that the little I see of it, general opinion on SM has less and less time for genderism. Those remarks like "why are you so obsessed with toilets" are much rarer lately. People see it for what it is; mediocre males muscling in.

Oliver Brown (plus one or two like-minded colleagues) is the reason I have a Telegraph subscription at all. It's certainly not for the politics.

Was not sure about posting this earlier. I was an amateur female pool player in the eighties. The leagues i was involved in were pubs and working men’s clubs.

There were not any female only leagues where i lived so i played against and with men.

i was going to waffle on about technicalities of the game. But thought you might like this story better.

Out on the piss with my girlie girlfriends, big hair all of that. Me docs back tights, scraped back hair thing.

Went into a ruffty tuffty pub, mates wanted to show my skills of sooo plonked fifty pence on table.

Man with “cut here” tattooed on his neck was my opponent.

Says would you like me to break love

Me “no lets toss”

i win toss, I break, pot three.

He gets one go fluffed it (obvs panicking)

seven balled him.

His mates pissing themselves, my girly mates dancing a gooden.

Me “next” girly mate hands me a pint of cider.

Beat them all. Danced out the door.

the disadvantage THEY had was the fear of being beaten by a woman.

technically women are at a disadvantage. Because of height hand size and strength.

Hope you liked my true story.

I DID like your true story 😍

@TWETMIRF We are not responsible for the hurt feelings of people who decide they want to use words in the opposite way to the vast majority of the world. Their upset does not trump ours at being forced to lie that men are women.

Very well said. I am sick of this. I want our words back, and all the rest. They don't want us to have anything that excludes males, anything at all.

@Bannedontherun

Loved the story!

I had a friend at uni who was decent at pool, knew how to down a pint, and how to set up her shoulder properly to arm wrestle. She used to take great delight in beating a (student) bloke at pool, arm wrestling then pint downing.

I am only just getting my head around the extent to which all things female only exist for (too many) male people inasmuch as they relate to said male people.
@Datun's post here, and another by @FlirtsWithRhinos that has been knocking around my head for a few weeks now, about sex segregation and how male people understand female sex segregation (that if we have our own spaces men will fetishise and other us and see our spaces as alluring - in other words, the subjective, personal reasons for female people coming together and creating something for ourselves are utterly opaque, and only the meaning that it superficially immediately available to male people, from a male perspective, have coherence / meaning / significance).
These are inchoate thoughts and I'm struggling to express my realisation. It's the way that male people consider or make sense of sex segregation. They can only see what a woman-only space or event is in relation to male people. They can only make sense of it in terms of what it means to male people.

I can understand this from de Beauvoir's explanation of female as Other to the default-human-male. But I think I didn't realise that it persists. I don't know why.
"When you see women's stuff purely as a tool for yourself, you tend to miss the actual reasons why we have it.
And even if you know the reasons, you won't care. Because that's not the point of women's stuff. The entire point of women, their space and all their stuff, is as a tool for men to utilise as and when they like."
I'm just going to repeat Datun's words because they're spot on.

This thread has made me nostalgic for the (g)olden days of pubs - jukebox, pool, ciggie machine, a vast array of snacks in packets and cheap pints. Maybe a quiz in the evening.

This whole thread has made me think about how absurd it is to see an amateur organisation being taken to task. It's not as though large amounts of prize money will be available - for amateurs the prize is usually an engraved trophy. Who on earth wants to make a song and dance about not having a cabinet of silverware?

I also thought that any decent sportsperson wants to stretch themselves at the highest level, so the opportunity to enter the Open level should be welcome - if there is a difference between men and women. If there is no difference then there is no detriment to a biological man entering the Open competition.

Which has led me to conclude that this is only about validation - that any such person needs to be in the woman's category to prove to the world that they are women.

I don't know whether this thread will get deleted or not.

Yes, it's rather depressing when you realise how some men really do see women purely in the role of a service.

I was struggling to follow the detail of when women were banned from playing in the men's event yesterday and whether or not HH could win this if HH was banned from the men's event because HH was saying HH was a woman and banned from the women's event because HH is male. HH should always have had the option to join the men's competition. Is HH saying HH didn't?

Did anyone else fully grasp what was being said here?

This morning's TT link...

https://x.com/tribunaltweets/status/1909515416025575582

Unfortunately TT have a problem archiving their tweets into a readable format for yesterday afternoon, session so you have to read the raw tweets which isn’t as clear.
It appears that the claimant has been referring to documents that aren’t in the bundle e.g. a blank contract was submitted not the one he had signed. Under cross examination he is also adamant that a conversation that one of the defendants describes never took place.

It’s not surprising that a man who thinks it OK to cheat by playing women as he cannot win against men should be a bit shifty in his evidence

https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/harriet-haynes-vs-paul-thomson-and

He is claiming aggravated damages because of comments made by another person in a competition that was not organised by this pool federation. He is also claiming damages because the federation outed him as transgender (which is bloody obvious to anyone who sees him) when he had already outed himself by commencing this case.

In a separate tournament run by a different organisation. Is that right?

It's v typical of TRA's that 99.9% of their argument is stop being so mean. Not sure that will fly in court, though.

It also, and this is just me personally, would compel me to ask the person in question to consider the effect on the women. Let's see what they think of that.

I suspect the-answers would be fairly revealing.

They think someone had to ‘out’ them for everyone to know they are biologically male?!! 🤣🤣🤣

Utterly delusional!

You were not the only one. Judge didn't understand either, and is asking good questions. There appears to be a bit of fudging having gone on re what HH is claiming is the situation.

Ha ha I thoughtI was being a bit slow not understanding what their case was.

There appears to be a bit of fudging having gone

indeed. It's one thing to be annoyed about what someone in a completely different competition has said, it's quite another for your legal team to agree you can claim aggravated damages on the back of it!

Claiming he was outed, despite being publicly out, on record, and, if I understand the transcript correctly, had even started proceedings on the basis of being trans!

these tribunals really do expose the TRA argument as absolutely fuck all.

apart from anything else, yes, absobloodylutely, your sex is the entire point.

But it's the thing about a GRC, isn't it? If you've got one, and you go to play in the ladies, anywhere, can the organisation concerned even exclude you, without outing you? And isn't the divulging of that information an offence?

(obviously not in this case, because it was all a matter of public record)

Plus I'm not even sure if HH has a GRC? The fencer does, apparently

Yes, and was it rowing/canoing where it was ok to have transwomen in women's events, but not in mixed events cos the men in those mixed events recognised that it was unfair?

This is rowing in America where there is mixed-sex eights (four men and four women - the only time where a male isn't allowed to id into a woman's place in the boat cos it might be unfair for the males in the other boat).

The judge is having to ask for a lot of clarifications to ensure clear answers from the witnesses. Isn't this usually the job of counsel? Seems unusual.

My video has frozen. Anyone else?

re: validation, I did wonder how each of those two male finalists would have felt at the other's presence in the final. a sisterly love-in or secret annoyance?