The legislature of New York’s Nassau County handed a legislation on Monday to ban girls’s and lady’s sports activities groups from utilizing sports activities amenities within the county on Lengthy Island until they exclude transgender women and girls from enjoying.
The legislation was just about similar to a thwarted order issued by Nassau County Govt Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, in February, which was immediately challenged by New York’s legal professional normal and an area girls’s roller-derby crew for violating a state ban on discrimination towards individuals primarily based on their intercourse or gender id.
Blakeman’s order, which he mentioned was wanted to permit cisgender women and girls the fairest likelihood to win sporting occasions, was thrown out by a New York court docket, which dominated final month that solely the county legislature had the ability to make such a change.
Beneath the brand new legislation, which Blakeman is predicted to signal, if an organizer of women’ or girls’s sports activities needs to ebook a county-run park or athletics facility, they need to ask every member of the groups concerned what intercourse was marked on their unique start certificates, and expel any teammates who weren’t designated feminine.
The restrictions don’t apply to boys’ and males’s groups, nor to combined groups not segregated by intercourse in Nassau County, a largely suburban chunk of Lengthy Island east of New York Metropolis.
Victoria Lagreca, a lawyer within the Nassau County legal professional’s workplace, defended the legislation by pointing to 4 episodes in recent times by which cisgender girls or ladies had been injured whereas enjoying sports activities alongside transgender girls or ladies. Two of the episodes had been in Massachusetts, one in North Carolina, and the fourth occurred in Canada.
In response to lawmakers’ questions, she mentioned she was not conscious of any such accidents in New York State, nor of what number of cases there have been of cisgender women and girls inflicting accidents in sports activities. Lagreca was unable to say how breaches of the legislation can be dealt with, nor how the county may examine allegations of violations from members of the general public, apart from to say such complaints can be dealt with on a “case by case foundation.”
The Republican-controlled Nassau County Legislature handed the legislation in a 12-5 vote after a listening to by which greater than a dozen members of the general public spoke to oppose the ban.
New York Legal professional Normal Letitia James has known as the restrictions each unlawful and transphobic. Civil rights teams have additionally condemned the trouble as unlawful discrimination and a useless invasion of individuals’s privateness.
In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court docket dominated that discrimination on the idea of sexuality or gender id quantities to unlawful intercourse discrimination underneath the Civil Rights Act.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has mentioned it would possible resume its litigation towards the Nassau restrictions on behalf of the Lengthy Island Curler Rebels, a girls’s curler derby crew belonging to a league that welcomes “all transgender girls, intersex girls, and gender expansive individuals.”
