Much Twitter talk on John Oliver's risible defence of men in women's sport on his US show at the weekend. Oliver Brown in the Telegraph takes it apart:
John Oliver, the British comedian whose viral rants have made him an unlikely standard-bearer for liberal America, broadcast his latest sophomoric skit on transgender athletes late on Sunday night. It was full of his usual fallacies: that biological males depriving women of sporting glory was somehow analogous to taller basketball players competing against shorter ones, or to Michael Phelps dominating swimming despite being “half-dolphin”. And yet the timing could not have been worse. For at the very moment this segment dropped, portraying sport’s trans scandal as somehow a niche issue, a women’s pool final in Wigan was being contested by two trans-identifying males….
Whether or not you regard pool as a fringe pursuit is immaterial. This is a category issue: sports are organised by sex to reflect the fact that, in physiology, men and women are immutably different, with profound implications for fairness. The travesty of Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith facing off for a female title despite both being born male sends a stark signal: that if you continue to enable this erosion of fairness in the name of inclusion, the last people standing in women’s sport will be men.
Women at the vanguard have been warning of this moment for years. They were even doing so in Wigan on Sunday, with the Manchester branch of the Women’s Rights Network holding up “Save Women’s Sports” banners to highlight what was about to unfold. And now we see the logical endgame, where Haynes and Smith combine to render the very notion of a women’s competition meaningless.
For Oliver and his ilk, the questions are simple. How much more of this injustice are you content to sit back and mock? How much longer will you delude yourselves that it is not happening when the ultimate rebuke to that claim is staring you in the face?
Trans activists pretend that no male advantage in pool exists. Try telling that to Lynne Pinches, who in 2023 forfeited her chance of a national championship by refusing to play Haynes, later turning down a professional contract on the grounds she was at a competitive disadvantage.
Pinches has spelt out the rationale: that men are taller, able to reach further, and with longer fingers necessary to bridge when the balls are clustered. Her arguments are substantiated by Dave Alciatore, a master instructor and author of The Illustrated Principles of Pool and Billiards, who writes: “Men generally have more strength and faster-twitch muscles that make it easier to execute many shots – especially power shots like the break and power draw – with greater accuracy, control and consistency.”
Even without these physical disparities, why are women not entitled to say no to men colonising their sport? There is a reason why the transgender lobby is often characterised as a men’s rights movement, and it is because women are cast, time and again, as unconsenting vehicles in the affirmation of male fantasy.
To anybody still demanding why we cannot all just be kind and inclusive, consider this: the adverse impact of this inclusion drive is endured, without exception, by women. You do not see women trying to make it in men’s cycling, or swimming, or fencing. You do not see women gatecrashing the final of the men’s pool. And that is because basic biology dictates the benefits in sport flow in only one direction, with mediocre males annexing victories and medals once they start masquerading as female.
To listen to Oliver’s justification of this absurdity was to wonder if he had paid any attention these past five years. His deployment of the “Phelps gambit” – the idea of a man’s sporting advantage over a woman being roughly akin to the one Michael Phelps, the 23-time Olympic champion swimmer, enjoyed over his rivals – was especially risible. As Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist, has highlighted, Phelps’s edge over his nearest pursuer in the 2004 Olympic butterfly final was 0.08 per cent. But what about the gap between his time and that of Petria Thomas, winner of the equivalent women’s event that summer? A mammoth 12.62 per cent.
And here's a thread from the organisation that Oliver specifically targeted…
She Won recently made an appearance on Last Week Tonight. John Oliver stuck to his tired recipe: dishonest sanctimony wrapped in a thick coating of self-deprecation (all the easier to swallow), this time about male athletes in women’s sports and specifically about our org. 🧵1/n:
— shewon.org (@shewon_org) April 7, 2025
Mick Hartley 
Leave a comment