TWIBS: Yet Another Sport Claimed by Trans Women
Two Dutch darts players have resigned from the Netherlands’ national darts team over the mere existence of a trans competitor! We have taken your darts… pray we do not take your frisbees.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
I am the greatest athlete alive.
I have every biological advantage you could possibly imagine, and I will use my superhuman powers to crush my rivals in any competition. Whether it’s chess, running, or high school sports, I will defeat any cisgender woman who foolishly challenges me.
Never mind that chronic pain in my joints makes it hard to climb stairs some days! You only need to know one thing to understand why I am so naturally gifted that I can take on ANY cisgender woman in ANY sport.
I’m a transgender woman.
Forget that most of the trans girls I know are waify, malnourished, iron-deficient computer science majors. That isn’t important! We’ve gone through male puberty.. and that means no mere cis woman can hope to compete with us! Even at sports that don’t involve any tangible athleticism!
You think you can beat one of us at darts?
Think again, lady. You may as well save everybody some time and bow out now, because my superior XY manly male… uh… wrists? Yeah, my masculine wrists and eyeballs are going to make you wish you never picked up a dart.
Excuse me, I got carried away lording my superiority over cis women, as one does. To back up a step: A Dutch darts player (a dartist?) has been racking up metaphorical kills across the European continent, and two of her contemporaries in the Dutch darts scene are throwing a temper tantrum over it.
Noa-Lynn van Leuven, a trans darts player from the Netherlands who seems really damn cool, kicked ass when she debuted at the PDC Challenge Tour, the penultimate worldwide competition for darts players. If she is one of the top two competitors at the end of the Challenge Tour, she’ll qualify for the World Championships.
Noa-Lynn is also a trans woman, now twenty-seven, who began transitioning at seventeen… so of course a whole bunch of shitheads are losing their minds over her participation in the sport. Two competitors in the women's league, Anca Zijlstra and Aileen de Graaf, have completely resigned from the Dutch national team to protest the fact that PDC is allowing Noa-Lynn to compete.
The crocodile tears are out in full force over… what, exactly? I would absolutely fucking love it if anybody could explain to me what kind of competitive advantage a trans woman would have at darts. We’re talking about a hobby played almost exclusively while shitfaced in a bar! PDC competitors must be the only people who have ever played darts sober!
Grow up! Get over yourself, you narcissists! We don’t have a “biological advantage” at darts, and frankly, if you have to make a dramatic Facebook post about your big darts career move, I would argue that you are just not a person who needs to be taken seriously.
Silver lining: The PDC very explicitly has van Leuven’s back.
PDC’s president, Paul Engelbertink, said, “There are strict requirements to be allowed to participate in tournaments as a transgender person, and Noa-Lynn meets them all.” He made his and the organization’s stance very clear by adding, “In this matter, we do support Noa-Lynn.”
Back in November of last year, PDC’s Chief Executive Matthew Porter talked about PDC’s involvement with Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces, a campaign to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion in sports. Porter said that they want to show that “the PDC is an inclusive space where anyone who’s interested in darts, anybody who likes playing darts, watching darts, following darts, can come and do so.”
He says he wants it to be known that the PDC is “somewhere you can come and feel that you’re not gonna have any level of harassment, any level of prejudice.”
And it’s so important to receive that level of support, because for most of us, including Noa-Lynn, transition isn’t just a choice about whether or not to take medicine or pursue surgery. It’s choosing to live instead of choosing to die.
Noa-Lynn said that if she hadn’t transitioned, she likely wouldn’t be here anymore. In the last few years before transitioning, she said, she didn’t have anything to live for.
“Now I am happy again and I have so much to live for,” she added. “I really love darts, I love playing it, I love meeting new people and traveling and that is all possible because of darts.”
This is what matters most to me. Sport is a human right, and besides providing community and fun, it can give some people a reason to keep going when they feel rudderless. The fact that two women who are ostensibly adults would completely fail to consider this, prioritizing their own hatred over another human’s right to thrive and be happy, is beyond childish.
But as long as we keep finding our happiness, like Noa-Lynn, it doesn’t matter what these losers decide to do. We’ll be fine.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in South Dakota.
