Caitlyn Jenner – Photo: David Fitzgerald/Web Summit via Sportsfile, Flickr CCCaitlyn Jenner, a traditional New York County resident, supported a conservative state’s policy that forbids transgender female athletes from competing in county-owned facilities.
Next month, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman issued an executive order to implement the restrictions.
Any sports clubs that are specifically made for women athletes and have trans staff members are prohibited from competing or practicing in Nassau’s 100+ state facilities, according to the law. This includes all ballfields, baseball and tennis courts, swimming pools, and ice rinks.
Due to the biological and physiological disparities that favor transgender athletes in any match-up, Blakeman argued that allowing trans female athletes to compete against cisgender women athletes was cruel and potentially harmful.
But, the ban does not apply to co-ed teams, nor to adult-designated sports teams where transgender males—who probably would also be in danger or at a dynamic disadvantage, per Blakeman’s logic—may be participating.
Speaking alongside Blakeman at his Mineola office on Monday, Jenner, who is transgender, backed the state director’s behavior, saying that allowing trans athletes to compete against cisgender girls did “ruin women’s sports for years to come.”
“Let’s stop it today while we can,” she said.
When Jenner won the 1976 Olympic gold medal in the decathlon, she did so as a man. She claimed she sympathizes with LGBTQ people’s challenges, but that allowing trans athletes to compete on children’s teams would undermine the progress made by female athletes since the passing of Title IX, a federal law that outlaws sex-based discrimination in academic and athletic programs at institutions receiving federal funding.
“All I’m trying to do is protect women,” the 74-year-old Jenner said.
The LGBT Network, a Long Island-based advocacy group, criticized Jenner’s feedback as a “baffling contradiction” to her own journey of being recognized as a woman, characterizing the position as “not merely dishonest but dangerous” to the LGBTQ community.
“It is depressing to see someone who has faced the challenges of being marginalized actively contribute to the oppression of others in the same community,” according to David Kilmnick, president of the LGBT Network, in a statement. Such actions only amplify the voices of intolerance and distract from the efforts made collectively to create a more inclusive society.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) issued a cease-and-desist order to Blakeman earlier this month, stating that the ban was unlawful and against New York’s LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination laws. Blakeman was advised to revoke his order or face legal action by James.
James added that all female athletes, including those who are cisgender, would need to be subjected to “intrusive and invasive questioning,” including those about their genitalia, in order to enforce the ban.
“We have no room for hate or bigotry in New York,” James said in a press release. This executive order is “blatantly illegal and transphobic.”
Blakeman, along with a 16-year-old volleyball player and her parents, subsequently filed his own lawsuit against the state, asking a federal court to affirm that the executive order was legal. He claimed that cisgender women would be denied equal opportunities in athletics and would risk serious injury or harm, especially in contact sports, without his executive order.
The New York Civil Liberties Union sued Nassau County on behalf of a regional women’s roller derby league, alleging that the executive order violated state human and civil rights laws intended to protect transgender or gender-nonconforming people from discrimination.
The Long Island Roller Rebels, the plaintiffs’ league, has requested that the Nassau County policy be declared unlawful and permanently overturned.
Legislation prohibiting transgender athletes from playing on sports teams that don’t match their gender at birth has been passed in at least 25 states, primarily those where Republicans control the governor’s office and the state legislature.
Some of those laws—namely, in Arizona, Idaho, Utah, and West Virginia—have been temporarily blocked by state or federal courts.
