Tennis great Margaret Court said during in a New Year’s sermon at a Pentecostal church where she is a minister that just because she doesn’t agree with people, doesn’t mean she hates them.
“I don’t hate anybody,” she said.
In part of the sermon, Court expanded on her conservative views on transgender athletes. Court has previously been criticized for her Christian views that oppose homosexuality and gay marriage.
Tennis Australia was torn over how to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its greatest female player at the Australian Open next month due to polarized responses from the community to her views on gender.
The dispute over her anniversary was eventually settled, with the governing sporting body agreeing to “recognise but not celebrate” Court’s achievement.
In her sermon on Sunday, Court also discussed transgender children.
“Because we are living in a season … even that LGBT and the schools—it’s of the devil, it’s not of God,” Court told her congregation.
“And when children are making the decision at seven or eight years of age to change their sex … no, just read the first two chapters of Genesis, that’s all I say. Male and female.
“It’s so wrong at that age because a lot of things are planted in this thought realm at that age. And they start to question ‘What am I?’ and if you are a Christian… you believe the word of God, this is our TV guide to life…
“And you know with that LGBT, they’ll wish they never put the T on the end of it because, particularly in women’s sports, they’re going to have so many problems.
“And you have got young people taking hormones and having changes, by the time they are 17 they are thinking, ‘Now I’m a boy and really I was a girl’.
“Because, you know what, God’s made us that way,” she said.
Court also repeated her view that being gay was “a choice.”
