The biggest triumph of her career so far
Jamie Hunter has won her first ranking title with victory in the US Women’s Snooker Open on Sunday in Seattle.
The Englishwoman secured the biggest triumph of her career so far with a 4-1 defeat of pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna in the final.
Hunter comfortably advanced from the initial round-robin phase with four successive 2-0 wins to earn a spot in the quarter-finals.
There’s just one tiny detail not mentioned in the article – Hunter is not a woman. The Daily Star is more forthcoming, aka more honest.
WPBSA chairman Jason Ferguson has congratulated Jamie Hunter after she became the first transgender player to win a ranking event.
Hunter, who came out as transgender in 2019, defeated pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna 4-1 to win the US Women’s Open on Sunday. The topic of transgender athletes in sport has become a major talking point in recent years, with swimming, rugby union, rugby league banning transgender women from competing.
All sports should ban trans women from competing in women’s sports, because women’s sports are for women.
And in sports with no sex divisions, there is still the issue of women’s dressing rooms, which should not have men in them.
Does being a man really give you an advantage in snooker though? It doesn’t seem like bigger muscles would really help. It’s not weightlifting. And I don’t think you need a changing room for snooker. To me it seems one of those “sports” like poker or chess where men don’t really have the advantage.
Interestingly there is no such thing as “men’s snooker”. The professional World Snooker Tour is open to anyone, regardless of gender (they mean sex) if you can qualify through a number of routes. There are currently four women playing on the tour.
The main route for women is the World Women’s Snooker tour, which “is a developmental tour aimed at increasing participation in snooker among women and girls from across the world.”
Seems to me that there are plenty of opportunities for trans players to compete without taking places from actual women, unless, of course, it isn’t the participation that is most important…
Snooker and a fair few other games and sports are in a similar position – they aren’t physically demanding, and so the reasoning based on sexual dimorphism is not applicable. Chess is similar, and is even less less physically demanding – yet it has had an open division and a women’s division for decades now. The reasoning for this has been cultural rather than biological.
Boys showing an early interest in chess were permitted to train, encouraged if they seemed promising, and were given access to chess masters to train with if they really took to it. Girls showing an interest were discouraged from playing at all, and had minimal chance to make a career of it even if they excelled. When attitudes improved and women were accepted in chess, the history of unequal attention was still prevalent and men and boys still had the lion’s share of training access, and so the results of women in the competitive ranks were very poor.
The women’s division was created to address this. I believe snooker, darts, and various other ‘lad’ games have similar histories and hence similar reasons behind their female divisions. They were created for female participants, women, and any male entrant in this division is an intruder. Males already dominate the various sports for social reasons; any that enter the women’s division are intruders and cheats.
All these historic “firsts” — but not really. Men have just found a new way of cheating women out of things, which has probably been going on for eons, both the cheating and the finding new ways. Trans “women” are not succeeding at being women by cheating women though, so it’s lose-lose, since they have obviously failed at being men too.
I don’t think it’s accurate to call non-athletic competitions “sports” although there are examples of it, like motorsports for instance, but I think that’s just a pet peeve of mine. I’ve always thought of billiards, darts, and chess as games, not sports.
Anna @ 2, no, I don’t suppose there is much (if any) advantage, but still it’s the US Women’s Snooker Open, so I don’t see why men can’t just stay out of it.
Twilight: agree. Although motor sports are extremely physically demanding.
@8 Right, especially motorcycles, very demanding. I think I was unclear, I see motorsports as sports, but not card or board games, or anything else people do while drinking in bars and pubs.
One of the women who was in the tournament explained that due to safety issues for women in the places snooker is mostly played, women don’t feel safe practicing for the hours it takes to be championship level snooker so there are few opportunittes to excel. That’s the advantage of being male in snooker, darts, and other games in which strength, but skill is what separates different levels of play.
One of my daughters was good at chess when she was about 13. The only problem was that she could beat all the boys, and that wasn’t acceptable. I thought that was good, but to my dismay she gave up chess.
I would assume that the height, length, and width of a snooker table, as well as the length of the cue, are based on something other than just pure coincidence – maybe the average height and arm length of the players? I don’t know if you can be too short to be good at snooker but a quick google tells me that the average height difference between men and women is 5 inches. That’s less than the difference in height between me and my sister and the difference in reach is comical – I can casually change the bulb in a ceiling light that my sister can barely brush with her fingertips if she jumps at it.
Athol, that’s a crying shame. My sister as a young teen showed huge promise in science, especially chemistry and physics. Her grades abruptly crashed when she was 15, and when I asked what was going on she said that her friends had told her girls didn’t do science. I told her they did and to get better friends. She didn’t…
A lot of pastimes that don’t require specific strength or skills that women generally might lack are still dominated by men. What? Well, sometimes it’s because they have traditionally been male and there have been social norms or even rules that restricted access by women and girls. Often such pastimes were in places women were not welcome – the public lounge* of bars and pubs, private clubs, and places that no sensible woman in times gone by went to. Of course, as girls and women get older, other factors kick in. They get busy catering to the needs of family, boyfriends, husbands, children. They often have little free time and less spare money to indulge themselves. They’d probably be accused of being selfish if they did.
I used to be deeply involved with a sport that was massively time consuming, and also required a significant financial commitment. Very few women did it because of those factors. We wanted women to join the sport. We tried really hard. Those factors were the block. The few women who were able to sustain the commitment were every bit as good as the guys.
* I recall when I was young that some old pubs, especially in rural areas had a ‘public lounge’ and a ‘ladies lounge’. Women were distinctly unwelcome in the public lounge. So glad those days have fled.