arborelia

Six Months After OBX

The moon rises over a beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Half a year ago, a serious transphobic incident happened at OBX Fall Flippers, a major IFPA tournament in Grandy, NC. I previously wrote about the transphobic bathroom-policing incident here. Nothing has been resolved since then, and it has risen to the status of a national NBC news article.

The IFPA is clearly tired of hearing about it, and they want us to stop protesting, without them having to fix anything.

What confuses some people, especially outsiders to the competitive pinball scene, is that they generalize from other news stories and -- before reading the story -- they assume that there was a problem with trans women competing in women's tournaments. And, of course, that is not true at all. Women's pinball is, on the whole, very welcoming of trans women and non-binary players.

It's not women's pinball that's the problem, really. It's open pinball, the kind that's mostly men, the kind we want more women to feel welcome in. The OBX incident happened during an open pinball tournament, and cis men didn't expect trans rights to be an issue that affected them.

A trans woman being ejected from a bathroom is not just a warning of danger. It is a whole slam tilt. The game is over. Bathroom policing is the line you do not cross unless you consider trans people to be sub-human, and you do not let anyone else cross it either.

The woman running registration crossed that line, and the TD and the IFPA stood back and let her cross it. The tournament proceeded for hours, while she threatened to call the cops on trans people. Tournament director Kevin Stone said "Under the stress, I simply had no idea what to do other than keep the tournament going." His lack of ideas seems to have included never having the idea to come out into the parking lot and talk to the trans people who were assembled there because we were afraid to enter the building.

We told some players what had happened. I think one or two of them left with us. Everyone else stayed, and it should be a stain on their conscience. If the trans players have been threatened and harassed and have left the tournament, and your main concern is whether you get to play enough qualifying games, you are no ally to trans people.

What we've lost in a decade

Think back ten years. In 2016, the North Carolina government passed a widely-criticized transphobic bathroom bill, HB2, mandating that people could only use the bathroom for the gender that is on their birth certificate. The reason it's not law anymore is that a lot of people fought back against it, hard.

In response to HB2, numerous events in North Carolina were cancelled, including the NBA All-Star Game, the tour of the musical Wicked, and a Bruce Springsteen concert. Companies halted plans to expand into North Carolina. The state's economy lost a lot of money over it, and the governor of North Carolina lost his bid for re-election to Roy Cooper, a critic of the law. The law was obviously cruel and arbitrary and it did a lot of damage for no reason, and the worst parts of it were repealed in 2017.

In 2026, unfortunately, trans people are a political punching bag in a way they were not a decade ago. Several states have passed bathroom bills and even worse laws against trans people, and cis people on the whole are doing nothing about it. Trans people are being fired for being trans, with no consequences. Events aren't being cancelled over bathroom bills anymore. Some trans people are fortunate enough to be able to flee to safer locations, but most remain in a life of fear and exclusion. Some stay in the closet. Some die because our society's transphobia is too much to live with.

North Carolina's bathroom bill has not returned. We can hope that North Carolina will never repeat that mistake, but we need to do more than hope, especially in the hostile political environment we're in now. We need to remember how hard the people of NC and elsewhere fought against bathroom exclusion a decade ago, and keep up the fight.

Unfortunately, last November, the fight came to pinball, and I was there to see it. What I saw was that almost all the cis people (and one trans person) shrugged it off. They'd rather not make a fuss.

In 2016, there was enough support for trans rights to cancel an NBA All-Star game. In 2025, we couldn't even cancel a pinball tournament. That is dire. You can't look at that and tell me that pinball is a good place for trans people.

And yes, I know, the IFPA is supportive of some trans people. It's all too common for an organization to support a few "good" trans women, ones who pass and don't make waves, while excluding any trans person who dares speak up. Look at the trans people who enjoy playing in the IFPA, you can say, with all the benefit of survivor bias. They're so content with things, on average!

What happened since then

The IFPA Women's Advisory Board unanimously recommended to revoke the points from the tournament, which had violated the IFPA's inclusion policy. IFPA President Josh Sharpe and IFPA Director Adam Becker overruled them all and blamed a trans woman on the advisory board for not communicating better.

The Women's Advisory Board all resigned. The IFPA discord became a firestorm of people upset at the IFPA for overruling the women's decision, people blaming women, people whining "can't we just play pinball", and people upset at trans people for inconveniently existing.

You can read some of this in the article where Josh Sharpe irresponsibly leaked internal chats to The Kineticist. Be prepared to get very angry, especially at the author nodding along with the men's take even as he posts the damning screenshots of the way they dismissed women.

In that article, Andy Bagwell chimed in with a statement that the IFPA should have blamed women more, that the worst thing that had happened was that IFPA men were called bigots, and that he had secret trans people who agreed with him.

Josh Sharpe issued a defensive non-apology. He "takes full responsibility," except not in any way that changes anything or involves him actually being held responsible. He spends most of the message making excuses and blaming women. But even in this useless, self-centered message, he agrees in hindsight that the tournament should have ended on the spot.

Adam Becker said, in another official IFPA statement, "the IFPA takes full responsibility for our failure" and "We stand in solidarity with the trans community," which makes me wonder if he is aware of what words mean. "Solidarity" means being on our side, fighting alongside us instead of against us, and helping us achieve the remedies we seek. Banning trans people who speak up from your Discord is not solidarity. Telling us to make our own events and go away is not solidarity.

Pinball communities in Portland, Chicago, and San Francisco split off from the IFPA. My home community, the NC Triangle Belles & Chimes, partially switched to holding Punk Rock Pinball tournaments instead of IFPA tournaments.

Many trans people, unfortunately, have been discouraged from playing in tournaments at all.

The IFPA tried to save face from its loss of the Women's Advisory Board by appointing several new women to IFPA staff roles, including the one trans woman who kept playing in OBX and supported the outcome.

The open community of Triangle Pinball Players continues to play in IFPA tournaments, but its TDs and many players support our resistance to the IFPA. For a while, what prevented a rift between those who want IFPA points and those who don't want to participate in the IFPA, was that those of us who are opposed to the IFPA could opt out. We could continue to participate in tournaments like the Triangle Pinball League with the rest of the local community, who we appreciate and don't want to be separated from, while not paying into the IFPA prize pool and not participating in their rankings.

Very shortly after the NBC article came out, the IFPA announced heavy-handedly that opt-outs were no longer allowed. This seemed particularly designed to try to force the OBX victims and their allies to stop protesting, even in the most unobtrusive way. The IFPA justified it by describing some shenanigans that top 250 players were doing with their scores, which has no relevance to us.

The choice the IFPA presents us with, officially, is that we can forget what happened and move on, or be excluded from playing pinball in their events.

Fortunately, the Triangle Pinball Players have not caved. I appreciate the directors of the Triangle Pinball Players for providing us options where we don't have to be forced into this choice.

What do I think should be done about OBX?

I am in agreement with the IFPA on some things: the IFPA failed, Josh Sharpe was responsible for its failure, and the IFPA should do better to stand in solidarity with the trans community.

So here are my recommendations to the IFPA for how to actually take responsibility and show solidarity. Some of these recommendations were previously brought to the IFPA by trans players and allies in Chicago.

Kaylee Campbell, when being appointed as IFPA staff, said "I'm going to win everyone back." That's a tall order but I would love to see it. The above is what it would take to win me back. Maybe you'd win back some others too.