A transgender woman with aspirations of playing professional pickleball made an unusual plea on Facebook, a plea to be allowed to play.
“I’m not a professional, a scientist or a doctor,” said Sara Weiss. “And honestly I don’t care where I have to play, I just want to play. And if someone wants to make that hard on me, you can, but I’ll show up and play.”
Weiss was rattled after the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), a group that advocates barring transgender women from competing in women’s categories of sports, singled out her participation as a woman last month in pickleball’s US Open in Naples, Florida.
ICONS identified her as a “trans-identifying male” competing as a woman in pickleball events. It elicited a lot of strong reaction.
“These men have no shame,” one poster wrote. “We have to kick them out. They will never back down. EVER. They love trampling on us.”
Weiss said it cast her in a light that was far from the truth.
“I don’t want to be a martyr for a community,” Weiss said. “If I’m being completely honest, in the LGBT community, there’s a lot of negativity, toxic negativity. And people, who say, ‘You need to bend to my will because I exist’ I don’t feel that way.
“You don’t need to…
