This is going to be interesting post to read in about an hour
If this was boxing or another sport where males have a physical advantage I’d understand, but pool?
Making a mockery of women’s sports after fighting so hard to get their own domain.
Good on her
I’m going to go controversial (but not for the reason you might think)
Pool isn’t a sport, it’s a parlour-game – if no level of fitness is required *it shouldn’t be called a sport*
Righto – on with the rest of my day
*flees*
Women shouldnt have to play against transwomen. Its ridiculous and totally unfair.
I feel really bad for the transgender athletes that constantly get thrust into the news and face online abuse and vitriol from people whenever an incident like this happens. The vast majority just want to be able to play and compete in the sport that they love, but face massive amounts of pushback and hate for something beyond their control.
That being said, I can also understand why people born biologically as females fear for the future of womens sports when they can be pushed out of competing at top levels against players born biologically as males, with all the physical advantages that come with it. I don’t know if that’s true with pool, but it certainly is with combat sports.
It’s such an incredibly thorny subject, and anyone that thinks there’s an easy solution is being disingenuous.
How is it an advantage in pool to be a man? Also people should listen Robert Sapolsky on this it really opened my eyes
Well done Kim. The likes of Harriet Hayes and Lea Thomas are utterly shameless. And they’re smug and bald faced about it
Legend?
Never heard of her
That’s stupid. It’s just pool. play the game and get on with it
She’s not wrong to not partake in this bs
Maybe sport just needs to reframe how it categorised different skill sets.
Open class: anyone can enter
Heavyweight: anyone up to a certain target (be it strength or speed or length of body or whatever)
Middleweight: as above but more restricted
Featherweight: as above but heavily restricted
This way anyone can play in the category that they fit into. But this does seem to require more effort to work out what skill you belong to so maybe it’s a higher burden on organisers.
But cue sports are effectively already an open category, so trying to take a stand makes no sense.
There are probably small differences in the brains of males and females. Males, as a group, tend to have stronger spatial abilities in some areas, females, as a group tend to have stronger language abilities in some areas. These may be biological differences, may be socialisation differences, probably a mixture of both.
That doesn’t mean that all men are better spatially or all women are better verbally, just as while men, as a group are stronger and taller, not every man is taller and stronger than every woman (and it’s likely that the differences are not obviously biological as strength and height)
Gender neutral and gender affirmative spaces are quite easy to accommodate in most areas of life and for the most part, I believe that people should be treated as the gender they want because, well, it really doesn’t affect me, and I enjoy being treated the gender that I feel I am, and why would you make life harder for someone when you really don’t have to.
However, it is very tricky when it comes to sports or other activities that involve demonstrating a skill that is probably influenced according to gender/biological sex.
I think a third category – a gender neutral category in most sports could accommodate all people (but probably would not have enough participants). It would likely be dominated by people assigned male at birth tho, no matter what sport – because of biological and socialisation factors.
Prison is another area that is difficult.
I am surprised pool is divided into men and women’s leagues in the first place.
Kimpossible
It’s pool…
Kim o Brien played for England for five years, then transitioned to being Irish. Hypocrite
Purely ideological and in no way is there any argument for this.
Pool isn’t a sport one gender can have any sort of biological advantage over the other.
Kim can do one. Congrats to her challenger.
From a consent point of view, Kim can choose to do whatever she wishes. I don’t think it is fair to brush her choice off as anti trans.
Kim has worked hard to get where she is and can choose to compete against who she wants.
Anyone arguing that trans women has an advantage in sports like pool, fishing, and darts over cis women is a fucking idiot.
NOOOOOOOOOOOO KIM !
Woman who has had completely female levels of hormones for a decade is apparently judged by her opponent as somehow having a male advantage in a parlour game where there is no real biological advantages between sexes in the first place
What [deleted] said to [deleted] was a good take about [deleted]
You can’t blame her for that though can you?
Taking the L to own the libs when the other didn’t necessarily have an advantage kek
Why isn’t every sport just split between open and female? Split it by sex (which is a scientific fact) rather than gender and we avoid all this nonsense.
28 comments
This is going to be interesting post to read in about an hour
If this was boxing or another sport where males have a physical advantage I’d understand, but pool?
Making a mockery of women’s sports after fighting so hard to get their own domain.
Good on her
I’m going to go controversial (but not for the reason you might think)
Pool isn’t a sport, it’s a parlour-game – if no level of fitness is required *it shouldn’t be called a sport*
Righto – on with the rest of my day
*flees*
Women shouldnt have to play against transwomen. Its ridiculous and totally unfair.
I feel really bad for the transgender athletes that constantly get thrust into the news and face online abuse and vitriol from people whenever an incident like this happens. The vast majority just want to be able to play and compete in the sport that they love, but face massive amounts of pushback and hate for something beyond their control.
That being said, I can also understand why people born biologically as females fear for the future of womens sports when they can be pushed out of competing at top levels against players born biologically as males, with all the physical advantages that come with it. I don’t know if that’s true with pool, but it certainly is with combat sports.
It’s such an incredibly thorny subject, and anyone that thinks there’s an easy solution is being disingenuous.
How is it an advantage in pool to be a man? Also people should listen Robert Sapolsky on this it really opened my eyes
Well done Kim. The likes of Harriet Hayes and Lea Thomas are utterly shameless. And they’re smug and bald faced about it
Legend?
Never heard of her
That’s stupid. It’s just pool. play the game and get on with it
She’s not wrong to not partake in this bs
Maybe sport just needs to reframe how it categorised different skill sets.
Open class: anyone can enter
Heavyweight: anyone up to a certain target (be it strength or speed or length of body or whatever)
Middleweight: as above but more restricted
Featherweight: as above but heavily restricted
This way anyone can play in the category that they fit into. But this does seem to require more effort to work out what skill you belong to so maybe it’s a higher burden on organisers.
But cue sports are effectively already an open category, so trying to take a stand makes no sense.
There are probably small differences in the brains of males and females. Males, as a group, tend to have stronger spatial abilities in some areas, females, as a group tend to have stronger language abilities in some areas. These may be biological differences, may be socialisation differences, probably a mixture of both.
That doesn’t mean that all men are better spatially or all women are better verbally, just as while men, as a group are stronger and taller, not every man is taller and stronger than every woman (and it’s likely that the differences are not obviously biological as strength and height)
Gender neutral and gender affirmative spaces are quite easy to accommodate in most areas of life and for the most part, I believe that people should be treated as the gender they want because, well, it really doesn’t affect me, and I enjoy being treated the gender that I feel I am, and why would you make life harder for someone when you really don’t have to.
However, it is very tricky when it comes to sports or other activities that involve demonstrating a skill that is probably influenced according to gender/biological sex.
I think a third category – a gender neutral category in most sports could accommodate all people (but probably would not have enough participants). It would likely be dominated by people assigned male at birth tho, no matter what sport – because of biological and socialisation factors.
Prison is another area that is difficult.
I am surprised pool is divided into men and women’s leagues in the first place.
Kimpossible
It’s pool…
Kim o Brien played for England for five years, then transitioned to being Irish. Hypocrite
Purely ideological and in no way is there any argument for this.
Pool isn’t a sport one gender can have any sort of biological advantage over the other.
Kim can do one. Congrats to her challenger.
From a consent point of view, Kim can choose to do whatever she wishes. I don’t think it is fair to brush her choice off as anti trans.
Kim has worked hard to get where she is and can choose to compete against who she wants.
Anyone arguing that trans women has an advantage in sports like pool, fishing, and darts over cis women is a fucking idiot.
NOOOOOOOOOOOO KIM !
Woman who has had completely female levels of hormones for a decade is apparently judged by her opponent as somehow having a male advantage in a parlour game where there is no real biological advantages between sexes in the first place
What [deleted] said to [deleted] was a good take about [deleted]
You can’t blame her for that though can you?
Taking the L to own the libs when the other didn’t necessarily have an advantage kek
Why isn’t every sport just split between open and female? Split it by sex (which is a scientific fact) rather than gender and we avoid all this nonsense.