This past Monday a historic first happened in the world of darts as 22-year-old Beau Greaves hit a 142 checkout to defeat former World Champion Michael Smith to win her first ever Players Championship and, in doing so, become the first woman to ever win a PDC senior tour/ranking event since the organization’s founding in the mid 90s. It’s a major milestone for gender equality in the game and represents an expansion of equity that women have been slowly laying claim to over the years.

It’s also the cumulation of at least a leg in the journey that began long before Fallon Sherrock became the Queen of Alexandra Palace during her run to the third round of the 2019/2020 World Championships. From a development perspective, it represents quite nicely the efficacy of shifting from pubs as the primary place from which players come to the proliferation of darts academies in the region over the last decade.

And while it should have felt something like an unalloyed good if you were watching while it was happening (especially with how improbable triple-digit checkout that sealed her victory was) I found myself at least a little angry at the things I was thinking as the last dart found its way into D11 to finish the final leg.

Some of it was that, while I don’t think it makes me better than other people, I am a dyed-in-the-wool leftist. Which is a way to quickly label myself as someone who has been told a bunch that I give way too much of a shit about what are now commonly referred to “social justice issues”. While this isn’t an entirely fair representation of how I move through the world, it is true that I often find myself at least partially preoccupied with those kinds of things while watching sports.

Roughly half of this comes from the ways in which they intersect with the real world and how, despite being perhaps the closest thing we have to a meritocracy in the modern world, it still reflects the inequities that persist off the field, or in this case, oche. But the other half comes from the idea that when I watch sports, I want to see the people playing unencumbered by all of the bullshit outside the TV screen to the best of our collective abilities.

Which means that while I was extremely happy for Beau, I also found myself pissed at the people who were making me think in that moment about what just happened Noa-Lynn van Leuven a few weeks before. For those unaware, Van Leuven is a transwoman from the Netherlands who was the target of a recent ruling by the Darts Regulatory Authority to prevent her (and seemingly her alone) from playing in the women’s series to supposedly put the DRA in compliance with the UK Supreme Court¹‘s ruling in the For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers case that came on the docket in spring of 2025.

This ruling sprung from a case infamously bankrolled by children’s book author and ironic-monster-of-her-own-making JK Rowling to ruin the lives of an entire group of people because she doesn’t like those affiliated and allied with them talk about her on the internet. A profoundly broken and shitty person, Rowling has spent much of the last decade becoming increasingly unhinged on the topic of trans folks² while raking in money from emotionally immature adults to feed her bigotry-fueled campaigns in hopes that doing so will fill whatever hole exist inside of her that her unfathomable wealth has been unable to in the interim.

The decision came with a clusterfuck of contradictions inherent to its attempt to codify an ineffable social construction like gender. But the crux of the situation is that it has made it increasingly difficult to for the transgender community to live, particularly in public, without fear of persecution and, perhaps more importantly, very real prosecution through selective enforcement of the Equality Act of 2010.

And that just seems like a lot of shit to put on a single person like Noa-Lynn, whose only crime is that she’s pretty good at darts in ways that are equal to, but don’t necessarily surpass the levels of her cisgender counterparts. Even the sporting decision itself, as explained by the press release by the organization who made it, seemed to recognize just how silly the whole thing is, stating that it was changing the existing policy, by including this line

“Whilst the performance gap is likely related to a number of relevant social factors,”

before attempting to hand wave it away by mentioning several “findings” made by a highly controversial anti-trans bigot named Emma Hilton. This is all done for show, but mostly serve to compound that very clear fact the people who came to the conclusion that Noa was a dangerous menace who must be removed from the Women’s Series have never actually watched darts.

The report by Hilton highlights such pertinent factors as:

These “findings” — especially having just watched a world championship final between a 6’4” Dutch dude and 5’9” boy from Warrington, in which the latter won going away — seem to be a series of vague answers in search of a ambiguous question that can be used to justify discrimination and bigotry. A mission which is not surprising given the purpose of Hilton’s hate group Sex Matters.

And it’s also a series of supposed facts that have been entirely contradicted by what we saw on Monday. Because, while it may be possible to differ on things like “should pre-transition trans women be able to play sports in ‘women-only’ spaces³” it’s basically impossible to genuinely believe even in those cases, that darts could possible be considered a “gender-affected sport”.

But because we live in a seemingly never ending, Kafka-esque nightmare, we are forced to watch over and over again⁴ as women succeed in competition against men while increasingly psychotic voices attempt to shout ever louder that what were seeing isn’t real. That we must protect women from those who do not fit the most narrow definition of what that means because to not do so would be unfair to everyone except for those directly affected by their hatred.

Which, like, is a real problem when all you want to do is watch someone throw sharp things at a board made of grass.