Trans snooker players face ban from women's game following football and cricket crackdowns
TRANS snooker players are set to be banned from the women's game.
The move follows crackdowns by football and cricket chiefs.
The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) is reviewing its policy after last month's Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.
Former world No 1 Maria Catalano, a cousin of ace Ronnie O'Sullivan, welcomed the review.
She has refused to play for three years since chiefs allowed trans women with reduced testosterone levels to compete in female events.
Maria said: 'Women cannot compete at the level the men do. They might win the odd match against biological men but for me, winning one match is not competing. There's a reason why they started a women's tour.'
The WPBSA said its position 'has always been that its policy would be subject to immediate review should there be a change in circumstances'.
Its statement added: 'This is a complicated issue as the WPBSA has to ensure it complies with equality legislation around the world as well as in the UK.'
In 2022, trans snooker player Jamie Hunter won the US Women's Snooker Open but was hit by an online backlash.
Yesterday 'with immediate effect'.
They had already been banned from the top two tiers.
The FA said on Thursday that trans women will no longer play in women's football from June 1.
Trans women are NOT women, Supreme Court rules in win for anti-woke campaigners after battle over female-only spaces
2
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
It is politicians – not regulators – who must make sense of the supreme court's gender ruling
It's almost two months now since the UK supreme court ruling on what makes a woman in the eyes of the law, which was hailed as a turning point in the battle over transgender rights. Not long enough for wounds to heal, in other words, but long enough surely to hope for a bit more clarity about what this means for everyday life: which toilets trans people can use, what this means for your local women's running club or gym, how employers can handle sensitive situations at work without outing or humiliating trans staff in front of colleagues and customers. But instead, the waters are getting muddier with every passing week. On Wednesday, Kishwer Falkner, now in the final five months of her term as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) watchdog, was grilled by the women and equalities select committee about the detailed code of practice she is due to submit to ministers next month, translating the ruling into everyday life. Since years of turning this issue into a political football haven't helped anyone, in an ideal world MPs could now leave it all in the hands of a trusted neutral arbiter, and resist the urge to meddle. Unfortunately, by the end of the hearing it was clear meddling may be urgently required. Within hours of the original supreme court ruling in April that 'woman' means 'biological woman' for the purpose of the Equality Act, and to the surprise of some lawyers, Lady Falkner had effectively pronounced inclusiveness dead. The EHRC issued interim guidance saying that trans people should stop using the toilets, changing rooms or NHS wards of their preferred gender – though for trans men who look male enough to be potentially frightening to women in female spaces, that's not straightforward – and only play on the grassroots sports teams of their birth sex. But is that really what the court intended? The former supreme court judge Jonathan Sumption has already warned of the risks of overinterpreting the ruling, arguing that he took it to confirm that single-sex services are entitled to exclude trans people, but not obliged to if they don't want to. Falkner, however, is sticking to her guns. Suppose you wanted to start a women's walking group, the Labour MP Rachel Taylor asked her, but you actively wanted to include trans women. Is that allowed? No, was the eventual answer: of course you can let your trans friend join, but then you'd be a mixed not single-sex group, and would have to also accept any man asking to join or risk getting sued. What the biological women in this group actually want – where they'd draw their own boundaries, or what feels right to them – is irrelevant on this reading, a position that may yet end up being tested in the courts. How any of this might be enforced in real life, meanwhile, seems vague at best. Asked how this imaginary walking group should check that every new member was definitely biologically female, Falkner suggested they might make a judgment on sight, but that nobody was going to be walking around with badges on policing it. Similarly on toilets, EHRC chief executive John Kirkpatrick told the committee that employers would need to provide facilities securing women's privacy and dignity, but that what that meant would vary locally and could be worked out 'on the basis of trust and openness and honesty'. With a large dollop of goodwill and forbearance on all sides, you can see how that might wash – except on this issue, there's vanishingly little of either to be found. The most awkward question, meanwhile, is whether a battle-scarred veteran of the culture wars such as Falkner is now sufficiently trusted to write the peace settlement. Originally appointed by Liz Truss to shake up an organisation seen by the Tories as too close to Stonewall, Falkner survived both attempted mutiny inside her organisation and vicious personal abuse from outside, as she dragged it into line with what would later end up being the supreme court's settled position: that trans women are not, in law, quite the same as biological women. She wouldn't be human if she didn't feel vindicated, and she was visibly emotional when the gender-critical MP Rosie Duffield (who has been through something similar) reminded her about the placards reading 'the only good Terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] is a dead Terf' or when protesters in 2022 dumped 60 bottles of urine on her office doorstep. But the legacy of those brutal years is that, fairly or unfairly, many trans people no longer trust the EHRC to defend their rights (as it's mandated to do for all protected groups). Falkner brushed off the committee's questions about that, saying she didn't see why people 'should become so fearful' when they haven't lost any rights (technically speaking, the court merely defined what the limits of those rights were). Yet where people do and don't feel welcome in society is determined by social norms as well as rights, and the former have swung from one extreme to the other in recent years; you don't have to disagree with the supreme court's ruling to see how that could be wildly disorienting. Though Falkner suggested it would be 'wise for space to be given to the regulator' to handle this – in other words, that parliament should back off – some Labour MPs are rapidly reaching the opposite view. A law that doesn't work in real-life scenarios is a law that doesn't work, full stop. On this evidence, parliament should prepare to roll up its sleeves. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
Supreme Court rules for girl with epilepsy in opinion that could affect education access lawsuits
The Supreme Court sided with a teenage girl with a rare form of epilepsy on Thursday in a unanimous ruling that could make it easier for families like hers to go to court over access to education. The girl's family says that her Minnesota school district didn't do enough to make sure she has the accommodations she needs to learn, including failing to provide adequate instruction in the evening when her seizures are less frequent. But lower courts ruled against the family's discrimination claims in court, despite finding the school had fallen short. That's because courts in that part of the country require plaintiffs in lawsuits against schools to show officials used 'bad faith or gross misjudgment,' a higher legal standard than most disability discrimination claims. The family appealed to the Supreme Court. The district, Osseo Area Schools, said that lowering the legal standard could expose the country's understaffed public schools to more lawsuits if their efforts fall short, even if officials are working in good faith. The district also argued that all claims over accommodations for people with disabilities should be held to the same higher standard — a potentially major switch that would have been a 'five-alarm fire' for the disability rights community, the girl's lawyers said. ___
NBC News
7 hours ago
- NBC News
Supreme Court revives FBI 'wrong house' raid lawsuit
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday revived a lawsuit against the FBI in a damages claim arising from an incident in which agents raided the wrong house in Atlanta. The ruling marks a narrow win for Toi Cliatt, his former girlfriend Trina Martina and her son Gabe Watson, who were all present during the house during the October 2017 encounter. The unanimous decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch means they can continue to press claims alleging assault, battery and false imprisonment under a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), one of the few avenues to hold federal officials accountable. Litigation will now continue in lower courts. The case highlights the problem of law enforcement raiding the wrong house, which has happened in several high-profile cases. A district court judge and the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the government. The legal question touched upon on whether a particular provision of the law, which allows claims concerning the actions of federal law enforcement officers, is trumped in this instance by another provision called 'the discretionary function exception,' which protects certain judgment calls from liability. The court did not resolve that question, but did remove a barrier to the plaintiffs being able to argue it in lower courts. "We readily acknowledge that different lower courts have taken different views of the discretionary function exception," Gorsuch wrote. "We acknowledge, too, that important questions surround whether and under what circumstances that exception may ever foreclose a suit like this one." In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that "there is a reason to think" that the discretionary function exception should not bar the plaintiffs' claims. Her opinion was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. During the raid in question the agents had guns drawn and used flag-bang grenades as they entered the house. Cliatt was handcuffed and thrown on the floor. Martin wanted to rush to her son but wasn't allowed to move. Watson, then aged seven, woke up to see agents with guns in his bedroom. The agents quickly left the house upon realizing their error and a supervisor returned later to apologize. The Justice Department in court papers said that a Garmin GPS device that FBI special agent Lawrence Guerra used to lead the team to the house had indicated the agents had arrived at the correct location. The FBI was seeking to arrest a man called Joseph Riley, who lived nearby. After they left the wrong house, the agents raided the correct home. Riley was arrested and later convicted.
