Irish pool champion Kim O’Brien has pulled out of the European Pool Championships after officials allowed a man to compete in the women’s category.
The European Pocket Billiard Federation (EPBF) has opened up its female categories to men who say they are transgender women, and this year, the organization approved the participation of Harriet Haynes, who says he “transitioned” to a female in 2014 at the age of 23, according to the Irish Post.
O’Brien has been playing pro pool for around a quarter century and became a member of Team England in 1992. She then joined the Irish team in 1997 and currently holds the top ranking.
She also has a long record of championships behind her. She has been the Suffolk champion multiple times, is a five-time Irish champion, and won the European Champion title in 2001 and 2010. She is only the second woman to have won that title twice.
But pro-women’s sports activist Riley Gaines put Harriet Haynes in the spotlight last month and decried the EPBF for allowing Haynes to compete as a woman. Gaines said she would pay O’Brien not to play against a man for the women’s championship.
Several other activists, including Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, also stepped up and pledged to math Gaines’s donation to O’Brien if the pool champ refuses to compete against Haynes.
Now, when the championship kicked off on Feb. 29, O’Brien abruptly announced that she was not going to play against Haynes.
Gaines was jubilant at the decision.
“The point is it’s the WOMEN’S category…. not a costume party,” she wrote on a Feb. 29 X post. “It’s about transparency. If it was advertised as coed, then that’s a different story. But that’s not what this was.”
“Why have a women’s category if anyone can compete in it? Women’s opportunities are only for women,” she cogently argued.