MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) — Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner on Monday stated she supported an area New York official’s order banning feminine sports activities groups with transgender athletes from utilizing county-owned amenities.
The ban applies to over 100 athletic amenities in New York Metropolis’s Lengthy Island suburbs. Talking alongside Nassau County Govt Bruce Blakeman at his workplace in Mineola, Jenner stated permitting transgender athletes like herself to compete towards different girls will “destroy girls’s sports activities” for years to come back.
“Let’s cease it now whereas we will,” stated the fact tv star, who got here out as a transgender lady in 2015.
The LGBT Community, a Lengthy Island-based advocacy group, known as Jenner’s feedback a “baffling contradiction” to her personal id as a transgender lady that’s “not solely hypocritical but in addition dangerous” to the LGBTQ neighborhood.
“It’s disheartening to witness somebody who has skilled the challenges of being marginalized actively contribute to the oppression of others throughout the identical neighborhood,” David Kilmnick, the group’s president, stated in a press release. “Such actions solely serve to amplify the voices of intolerance and detract from the collective efforts in direction of a extra inclusive society.”
Blakeman, a Republican elected in 2021, issued an government order in February requiring any groups, leagues or organizations looking for a allow from the county’s parks and recreation division to “expressly designate” whether or not they’re for male, feminine or coed athletes.
Any groups designated as “feminine” could be denied permits if they permit transgender athletes to take part.
The ban doesn’t apply to males’s groups with transgender athletes. It covers all Nassau County-owned amenities, together with ballfields, basketball and tennis courts, swimming swimming pools and ice rinks.
Jenner, 74, competed towards males when she received the Olympic gold medal within the decathlon in 1976. She stated she has “sympathy” for LGBTQ individuals and “understands their struggles” however argued that permitting transgender individuals to compete with girls would undermine beneficial properties feminine athletes achieved below Title IX, a regulation banning intercourse discrimination in packages that obtain federal funds.
“All I’m making an attempt to do is shield girls,” Jenner stated Monday.
Jenner, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, has been a vocal opponent of transgender athletes competing in girls’s sports activities. A New York native, she has lengthy lived within the Los Angeles space and ran unsuccessfully for California governor as a Republican in 2021.
Blakeman has argued the ban is meant to each foster truthful play and shield women and girls from getting injured in the event that they play towards transgender girls. His government order, nonetheless, additionally covers sports activities like swimming, gymnastics, determine skating and monitor, the place there isn’t a bodily contact between opponents.
The chief order additionally takes choices about who can play out of the arms of leagues and offers it to the federal government.
The Lengthy Island Curler Rebels, an area girls’s curler derby league, requested a New York courtroom to invalidate the county order, saying it violates the state’s anti-discrimination legal guidelines.
The New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the league, known as Jenner’s look “one other disgraceful try” to focus on and villainize transgender girls and ladies. Legal professional Normal Letitia James, a Democrat, stated Blakeman’s order is “transphobic and discriminatory” and violates state regulation.
Blakeman has filed his personal lawsuit asking a federal courtroom in New York to affirm that the order was authorized.
The order is a part of a rising variety of anti-transgender athletic restrictions imposed nationwide. Payments banning trans youth from collaborating in sports activities have handed in some 24 states, although some have been blocked by ongoing litigation.
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This story has been corrected to indicate that Blakeman was elected in 2021, not 2022.
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Observe Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.