These Chicks and Their Sticks: Men Dominate Women’s Pool Championship in Wigan

Two biological males faced off for a women’s sports title this past weekend in Wigan, UK — and one walked away as the women’s champion.

At the Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2, Chris "Harriet" Haynes beat Lucy Smith in the final match, both of whom were born male and identify as transgender women. Haynes took home the trophy and a £1,800 prize — all in a division designed to recognize and reward women in sport. Not women-identifying individuals. Women.

This is part of a growing pattern. Across numerous sports, biological males — many with clear physiological advantages — are entering women’s categories and pushing female athletes out of the winner’s circle. What was once unthinkable is now quietly celebrated in media headlines and press releases, as if something profoundly fair or progressive has taken place.

But it hasn’t.

Let’s step back and look at what’s really happening here. Gender dysphoria is a serious psychological condition. It causes deep and painful distress for those who experience it, and those individuals deserve respect, care, and mental health support. But society has taken a sharp turn in recent years — from compassion to capitulation. From understanding dysphoria as a mental health struggle to treating it as a truth that must be affirmed at all costs, even when it contradicts physical reality.

We’ve been told that calling someone by their “preferred gender” is kind. That using the opposite-sex pronouns is supportive. That agreeing to their internal identity is the height of compassion. But what if it’s not? What if, by going along with a person’s internal misperception of their own body, we’re not helping — we’re enabling?

We wouldn’t tell a person with paranoid schizophrenia who believes they’re being hunted by time-traveling agents that their fears are real. We wouldn’t help build the time machine. We would help them anchor back into reality with care and clinical support. Why is it any different when someone believes themselves to be the opposite sex?

Affirmation, in this context, isn’t healing — it’s hiding. It’s asking society to participate in someone else’s deeply personal struggle by pretending it isn’t happening. And when that delusion crosses over into public life — into policy, into law, and especially into competitive sports — it’s no longer a private matter. It’s a public injustice.

Biological reality still matters. Especially in physical competition, where advantages like height, muscle mass, bone density, and reaction speed are not erased by hormone therapy or name changes. That’s why women’s divisions were created in the first place — not to exclude, but to ensure fairness.

The solution isn’t cruelty. It’s not shame or exclusion. It’s clarity. Trans-identified individuals should have the opportunity to compete — but not at the expense of fairness for women. Co-ed divisions or open categories could offer inclusive alternatives. But allowing biological males to compete as women is not inclusion. It’s intrusion. And it’s happening on courts, fields, tracks, mats, and now pool tables around the world.

Female athletes have every right to be angry. To feel betrayed. To speak up. And many are. But their voices are being silenced in the name of tolerance — even as their spaces are quietly dismantled.

Compassion means helping people heal. It doesn’t mean endorsing a delusion, no matter how sincerely it's believed. And when that delusion results in women being erased from their own competitions, it’s time to draw a line — not in hatred, but in truth.