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When Noa-Lynn van Leuven walks onto the stage at Alexandra Palace, the 28-year-old will make history as the first transgender darts player to compete at the PDC World Championship.
Van Leuven’s debut at the tournament will also represent a personal journey of self-acceptance and perseverance in which the sport of darts has, for her, played a significant role. Van Leuven just wants to play, though her appearance at the World Championship will also come alongside wider attention and outside noise.
The Dutchwoman accepts that; it is a reality she has had to get used to since first competing as a transgender player on the Women’s Series in 2022. But, while the spotlight is on her, Van Leuven wants her story to be represented correctly. There can be consequences when this does not happen. An element of Van Leuven’s career, which has been heavily reported ahead of the World Championship, is the hostility she has sometimes faced when competing against other women. Or, rather, when she started beating other women at tournaments.
Before her debut at the World Championship, Van Leuven told Sky Sports that details around her transition journey have been misrepresented. “They’re like ‘Noa-Lynn transitioned in 2022’. I did not. I transitioned about nine, 10 years ago,” she told Sky. “They make it look like, okay, Noa-Lynn transitioned in 2021, a year before she started appearing on the women’s tournament. That’s not true. They’re almost making it look like, OK, she wasn’t good enough with the men, and now she’s just going to do this.”
Van Leuven added that she would not understand anyone wanting to transition to “just be better” at darts, as if part of a wider plan. She was first introduced to the sport as a child in the Netherlands, watching Dutch icons Raymond van Barneveld and Michael van Gerwen, and began playing seriously at the age of 12. But Van Leuven was not happy with who she was. She previously told the Guardian that she started exploring her journey when she was “16 or 17” – at which point figuring out her identity took priority and she stopped playing darts.
“I was getting more and more unhappy with myself, to a point that I didn’t want to live any more,” she said. “And that was the moment where I thought: I can go two sides now. I can end it, or I can live as who I want to live.” The journey itself took time, due to waiting lists for trans health care and hospital appointments. After transitioning and feeling happy in herself, there were “three or four years” until she started playing again, due to having to wait on several federations determining the rules on trans participation.
But when she was granted permission to compete in women’s darts in 2021 and picked up her arrows, she realised she had rediscovered something special in her life.
“I missed the game, I missed the people within darts,” she told the Press Association. “It is a dream to come true, the years before I transitioned I didn’t even have any dreams. I wasn’t happy. Now I am happy again and I have so much to live for. I really love darts, I love playing it, I love meeting new people and travelling and that is all possible because of darts.”
Opposition to Van Leuven appearing on the women’s circuit increased after winning the Denmark Open in 2023. The PDC stands by its “fair” policy on transgender players competing in women’s competition – it requires players to have a testosterone level below a certain level for at least 12 months and says a player’s gender identity cannot be changed for a minimum of four years. The PDC’s chief executive Matt Porter has said Van Leuven “more than complies”.
Of course, when competing at the PDC World Championship, Van Leuven will be participating in open competition. The hostility comes from the 28-year-old claiming one of the two female places at Alexandra Palace through her performances on the Women’s Series, where she has won four titles this year while also still working as a part-time sous chef in the Netherlands.
Van Leuven has said she has faced “a lot of conservative, toxic b******s” on the women’s tour, who see her as a “threat”. In May, the British player Deta Hedman refused to play against Van Leuven because she is trans.
Van Leuven believes there is more opposition behind her back. She was also booed as she appeared at last month’s Grand Slam of Darts, in what was her first appearance in a televised PDC tournament against men. The World Championship is a bigger stage, and brings more noise.
But she has also received support from players such as reigning world champion Luke Humphries and one of her heroes in Michael van Gerwen. “I just look at her as a dart player,” Humphries said last month. “She has not broken any rules. She is doing what she is allowed to do. I can’t say that she is doing anything wrong. I don’t really know, it’s a hard one, because there are so many different opinions that get thrown around. It would be nice if people let her get on with it and play.”
