Trans Pool Player Harriet Haynes Gets Her Day in Court — Again
After being banned from women's eight-ball competitions and losing her initial discrimination claim, Harriet Haynes has been granted a High Court appeal that could reshape how the UK's landmark sex definition ruling applies to sport.
Harriet Haynes has been playing pool competitively for years. She’s won tournaments, earned rankings, and built a reputation in the English eight-ball community. She also happens to be a transgender woman — and since December 2023, that fact has made her ineligible to compete in the women’s category.
Now, after losing a discrimination claim last August, Haynes has been granted permission to appeal to the High Court. The hearing, confirmed this week, could become one of the most significant tests of how the UK Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling — which defined “woman” in the Equality Act as referring to biological sex — actually plays out in everyday life.
What happened
In August 2023, the English Blackball Pool Federation announced that only people assigned female at birth would be eligible for women’s competitions, effective December of that year. An open category was created for men and trans women. Haynes, who had been competing in women’s events, was effectively barred from the category she’d played in for years.
She brought a discrimination claim against the EBPF. Last August, a county court judge dismissed the claim, ruling that the federation’s policy was a proportionate means of ensuring fair competition.
But in March 2026, Mr. Justice Ritchie at the High Court granted Haynes permission to appeal — overruling the original trial judge, who had denied it. The appeal will examine whether the EBPF’s blanket ban on trans women is truly necessary, or whether a more nuanced approach could protect both fairness and inclusion.
Why this case matters beyond pool
Pool is not a sport where the physical advantages typically cited in debates about trans athletes — height, muscle mass, bone density — are obviously decisive. Eight-ball is a precision game, more about geometry, strategy, and composure than raw physical power. That makes Haynes’s case a useful test of whether sporting bans on trans women are being applied thoughtfully or reflexively.
The timing adds another layer. Since the UK Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers last April, which held that “sex” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex rather than legal gender, sports governing bodies across the UK have been recalibrating their policies. World Snooker banned trans women from professional competition entirely in April 2026. The English Blackball Pool Federation’s policy predates the Supreme Court ruling, but the legal landscape it now operates in has shifted significantly.
Haynes’s legal team is expected to argue that the EBPF failed to conduct a proper assessment of whether trans women actually hold a competitive advantage in pool, and that a blanket ban — rather than case-by-case evaluation — amounts to disproportionate discrimination.
The broader pattern
Across the UK and beyond, trans athletes are facing an accelerating wave of exclusions. World Athletics, World Aquatics, and now World Snooker have all adopted policies that effectively bar trans women from women’s competition. The International Olympic Committee’s 2021 framework, which moved away from testosterone-based eligibility toward sport-specific assessments, has been increasingly sidelined in practice.
What makes Haynes’s appeal notable is that it forces the courts to grapple with specifics rather than generalities. It’s one thing to argue that trans women might have advantages in swimming or sprinting. It’s another to make that case about a game played on a table with a cue and sixteen balls.
What to watch for
The High Court appeal hasn’t been scheduled yet, but it’s expected to be heard in the coming months. The outcome could set a precedent for how sporting bodies justify exclusionary policies under the Equality Act — particularly in sports where physiological differences are less clearly relevant.
For Haynes, the stakes are personal. She’s said publicly that she’s fighting not just for herself but for the integrity of a principle: that trans women should not be excluded from spaces without evidence that their inclusion causes harm.
Whether the High Court agrees will be one of the more closely watched LGBTQ+ rights decisions in the UK this year.
