WILMINGTON, N.C. — Some of the best women's pinball players in North Carolina had a dilemma: Though it was an honor to be among the 16 invited to compete for the state title in January and a shot at nationals, they wondered whether they should skip the tournament in protest.
Kat Lake considered declining to send a message of support to her fellow trans pinball players amid a painful rift. But Lake, one of the top women in the country, also didn't want to give up on years of hard work climbing the ranks.
She ultimately decided to go, and on an unusually cold and rainy Sunday this month, she drove to the Coastal Hemp Company, a joint hemp shop and arcade. She greeted her competitors with hugs.
"These are the people that got me into pinball, that helped me become who I am, and I don't want to throw any of that away," she said.
Competitive pinball is a surprisingly intense sport with an inclusive culture, a niche pursuit that has long been safe from the spotlight — and from national politics. Then, at a tournament in November, an arcade employee insisted that a transgender competitor couldn't use the women's bathroom. The incident — and how it was handled by the sport's governing body, the International Flipper Pinball Association — tilted a friendly community into turmoil.
The all-male leaders of the IFPA say they received threatening messages. Players accused the organization of not doing enough to back trans competitors. The group's entire Women's Advisory Board resigned. Tournament directors and players across the country have boycotted IFPA events as a show of support for trans players.
The pinball blowup occurred at a moment when trans people face an increasingly hostile environment in the United States, particularly in sports. Twenty-nine states have laws or regulations prohibiting trans student-athletes in K-12 schools or colleges from competing on teams that align with their gender identities. The governing bodies for sports ranging fromswimmingandtrackto pursuits likechessanddartshave banned trans women from women's events.
What makes this dispute unusual is that everyone, including the IFPA, agrees that trans women should be allowed to play. The division is over the aftermath of the bathroom incident and whether the trans people involved received enough support. It highlights the complexities that even the smallest and most inclusive sports organizations are struggling to navigate in a tense political climate.
'Shrinking safe spaces'
The trans woman barred from using the bathroom said pinball had, until that day, been her safe space. B., a computer programmer based in Raleigh, asked to go by an initial because not everyone in her life knows she's transgender, though her pinball community does.
B. said she started playing in a local pinball league just over a year ago, and she has come to love the sport. She likes the flow state she gets into. After she lands shots, she sometimes breaks into a celebratory dance.
She has also found acceptance through the hobby. B. said the first person she came out to in pinball was Joan McCool, 72, who has been playing pinball since 1975 and is affectionately known as "pinball mom." McCool was immediately supportive. B. also learned that there are many trans people competing in the sport.
One of them is Kaylee Campbell. She came out as a trans woman in the fall of 2020 and asked the IFPA to change her name on official records. At that point, the IFPA didn't have a clear policy on trans players, but leaders were welcoming.
"It could sound silly to some people, but before transitioning, I was worried about my family, my job and then pinball — that was the order of fears of things that I may be losing by coming out publicly," Campbell said. "It makes me really proud that I'm putting things out there and being part of something that can be a safe space in a world with seemingly shrinking safe spaces."
After President Donald Trump returned to office last year and signed policies targeting transgender people, theIFPA said in a statementthat its tournaments should be "free from homophobia, transphobia, and all other types of discrimination." By then, it hadadopted a gender inclusion policy.
Finding out that her hobby was so trans-inclusive was "a breath of fresh air," B. said, which is what made the bathroom incident so jarring.
B. traveled to Grandy, a small, conservative coastal town, in early November. She planned to compete in the Outer Banks, or OBX, Fall Flippers Pinball Tournament. The tournament venue, Flippers Convenience & Arcade, boasts the most pinball machines in the state.
On Nov. 7, the first day of the tournament, B. said, she went to the bathroom about 10 minutes before the competition. As she washed her hands, a woman who manages the arcade came in and told her that it was against the law for her to be there and that the men's room was across the hall.
"I was just dumbstruck," B. said.
She left the bathroom and immediately told Samantha Bacon, a co-director of the tournament. Bacon, an aerospace engineer from Wake Forest, is also transgender and one of the top players in the country.
Bacon began to panic. There were a lot of trans and gender-nonconforming queer players at the tournament who would need to use the restrooms, she said.
She confronted Becky Connell, the manager who had spoken to B. Connell, Bacon said, pulled out an iPad and showed her a recent North Carolina bill that she said prohibited trans women from using the women's restroom.
"She puts it in front of my face and says: 'This is the law. If it happens again, I'm calling the cops,'" Bacon said. Bacon looked up the bill and showed Connell that it hadn't been passed into law, but, she said, Connell insisted that she was the manager and that she would have anyone she thought was in the wrong restroom charged with trespassing.
In text messages with NBC News, Connell said she confronted a trans person in the bathroom and "politely told" them that "the men's restroom was next door." (Connell said the person she confronted was a different person, not B.; that player, who is nonbinary, told NBC News that Connell didn't speak to them in the bathroom.) Connell didn't respond to questions about the state bill and said she threatened to call the police only when some of the pinball players started harassing her, which the players denied. She said she later received an anonymous unsettling letter at her home.
The arcade's owner, David Shields, said in a text message that transgender participants have always been allowed to use the women's restroom since the arcade started hosting tournaments in 2012. He defended Connell, calling the November situation regrettable but "not intended to cause harm." The arcade is "committed to fostering a positive and respectful atmosphere for all," he said.
Bacon's next move on the afternoon of Nov. 7 was to message the IFPA's leadership. Josh Sharpe, the organization's president, told her she had the authority to shut the entire tournament down if necessary, because the event was in violation of its inclusion policy.
Bacon consulted Campbell, the tournament co-director, about whether to cancel.
"I was worried that they would just blame the trans people for getting the whole tournament canceled," Campbell said. She searched for an alternative solution.
News of the incident spread quickly, and about a dozen players, many of them trans, gathered outside the arcade, with most saying they didn't feel comfortable going in.
Kevin Stone, the main tournament director, told Campbell and Bacon that he didn't know what to do. Campbell suggested providing three additional hours of qualifying time to players who wanted to wait until Connell left. With that temporary solution, Bacon sent a message to IFPA leadership around 3 p.m. that said, "We got it sorted."
But the issue was far from sorted. Neither those organizing the tournament nor the IFPA initially understood the potential fallout. The fact that no one chose to cancel the tournament was part of what ultimately fractured the pinball community — which Bacon said she carries guilt about even though she feels it wasn't her fault.
Immediately after the bathroom confrontation, a friend guided B. to the arcade's back patio, where, she said, she had a panic attack and then went back to her hotel. She never returned to the arcade.
"Those first few days, it was a lot," B. said. "Being so new to being open about being trans, I think that was probably one of my first five times using a restroom labeled as women's. I've definitely, over the past few months, took a few steps back in how public about being trans I've been."
No one from IFPA leadership has reached out to her, B. said.
A painful divide
Once the IFPA's leaders fully understood what happened at the Outer Banks tournament, they agreed on the key issues: that trans women should feel safe at tournaments, including in women's restrooms, and that the bathroom incident violated the IFPA's inclusion policy, which meant the event should have been de-sanctioned, meaning the points players earned wouldn't count.
But it wasn't. The tournament continued, sanctioned, for the rest of the weekend, and that is where the fracture began. The IFPA's leadership, an all-volunteer group of men mostly responsible for developing algorithms to maintain the world pinball rankings, was suddenly thrust into an emotional debate. Many players, including trans players from North Carolina, expected the leaders to de-sanction the tournament to send a message that what happened wasn't acceptable. Some players took the IFPA's decision to mean that points were more important to leadership than trans players' inclusion and safety.
In the days afterward, Stone, the main tournament director at the event,apologized, saying he should have delayed the tournament until Connell left. He did not respond to requests for comment.
IFPA Director Adam Becker issued statements describingwhat happened as a leadership failure. He said Flippers Convenience & Arcade would be prohibited from hosting IFPA-sanctioned events for at least a year.
However, he said, the IFPAwouldn't de-sanction the eventbecause it didn't want to set a precedent that it could retroactively revoke sanctioning "based on failures of the IFPA organization." The IFPA pointed to Bacon's "We got it sorted" message specifically. Bacon felt the leaders were blaming her, and she resigned from the IFPA's Women's Advisory Board.
"If you're going to throw me under the bus like that, I'm gone," she said.
The IFPA said in a statement that the organization regretted that its handling of the situation contributed to Bacon "feeling blamed or singled out."
Over the next week, the debate over whether the tournament should remain sanctioned went national, with more than1,400 players signing a petitiondemanding that the organization reverse its decision. The four remaining members of the women's board voted to remove sanctioning, but Becker overruled them. As a result, they allresigned Nov. 19.
An online chat for IFPA players became heated, and IFPA leaders said that's when they began to receive alarming messages, with one calling them "transphobic pieces of trash," according to screenshots shared with NBC News.
The incident has especially shaken the women's pinball community, which has grown since the IFPA began recognizing women's tournaments in 2022. Players said the women's-only matchups began in part because arcades and gaming culture can be misogynistic. Men are likelier to hover over players during a game, which can be distracting and intimidating, players said.
As anger at the IFPA grew, players began boycotting events and some tournament organizers began pulling out of the IFPA. One tournament director in Oregon said players there were discussing starting their own competition circuit.
In response to the backlash, the IFPA has rolled out a number of policy and staff changes. It created an email address that players and tournament directors can use to report incidents that threaten player safety. It alerts the entire IFPA leadership team, which the group recently expanded toinclude Campbell and another woman. The IFPA also published a newcode of conductandinclusion policy, which tournament directors have to acknowledge that they have read before they submit new events to the IFPA.
Sharpe, the IFPA's president and one of the top players in the world, said in a phone interview that one of the key lessons the organization learned was that simply having inclusion policies on a website wasn't sufficient.
"We learned that we do have to do more, providing the organizers of these events with clear, enforceable guidance on how they can respond to these situations when they occur," he said.
The IFPA said its failure to contact B. was another communication error.
Going forward, Sharpe said, his biggest message to trans players is that they belong and that they should expect to feel safe and respected at IFPA-sanctioned events.
'I'm still going to be here'
For B., rebuilding trust is a work in progress.
She sees the IFPA's new inclusion policy as a good step but wonders whether it will actually be followed.
"What happened at Flippers was covered by the policy that they had," she said.
A week after the incident in the Outer Banks, B. said, she was shocked to play the best pinball of her life, winning eight matches in a row over two tournaments and qualifying for the North Carolina women's state championship for the first time.
That's how she found herself at the Coastal Hemp Company for the women's state tournament in January, nervously preparing to play against friends and players she looked up to. As the owners fired up a countertop popcorn machine, a disco ball hanging from the ceiling cast hundreds of shimmering reflections across the room.
She didn't reach the final round, where Bacon faced Campbell, her longtime rival, and won, with Lake coming in third. But B. said she was glad she tried. Even though she has complicated feelings about competing, she refuses to stop playing.
"F--- them, I'm still going to be here," she said. "Pinball has been such an escape," she added. "I'm not giving that up."
