Former Olympic gold medal champion Caitlyn Jenner has come out in help of a New York county’s ban on women’ and girls’s sports activities groups that embrace transgender athletes from utilizing the county’s public amenities, saying that transgender athletes shouldn’t be in a position to compete in ladies’s sports activities.
“Trans ladies are competing towards ladies, taking beneficial alternatives for the lengthy protected class beneath Title IX and inflicting bodily hurt,” Jenner stated Monday at a information convention in Mineola, New York, with Nassau County Government Bruce Blakeman, who signed the chief order on Feb. 22.
Jenner, 74, who received the boys’s decathlon on the 1976 Olympics, got here out as a transgender girl in 2015 and has been a vocal critic of trans ladies competing in ladies’s sports activities since 2021. Since 2020, half of states have handed legal guidelines or laws that ban trans pupil athletes from competing on ladies’s faculty sports activities groups, based on the Motion Development Challenge, an LGBTQ assume tank.
In a put up on X Saturday, Jenner stated she felt compelled to talk about the problem as a trans girl to point out that “it’s biology, it’s not about exclusion or not being tolerant.”
In an interview with NBC Information, David Kilmnick, president of the New York LGBT Community, an LGBTQ nonprofit on Lengthy Island and in Queens, referred to as Jenner’s help of the order a “baffling contradiction to her personal identification.” He stated he fears {that a} high-profile athlete throwing their help behind Blakeman’s ban might contribute to bullying of trans youths.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state’s lawyer normal, Letitia James, each Democrats, have spoken out towards the ban, and accused Blakeman, a Republican, of bullying transgender youths.
James challenged the order in courtroom March 1 with a “stop and desist letter,” demanding that Blakeman rescind the order, arguing that it violates the state’s anti-discrimination legal guidelines. In it, she referred to as the order “transphobic” and stated it topics ladies’s and women’ sports activities groups to “invasive questioning.”
Blakeman’s authorized workforce filed its personal lawsuit on March 5 alleging that James’ “stop and desist” letter violates the 14th Modification’s equal safety clause.
“Not solely was the chief order authorized, however we had an obligation to defend it,” Blakeman stated Monday.
Blakeman has defended the ban — which covers greater than 100 county-owned amenities — as vital to guard cisgender women and girls from getting damage whereas enjoying sports activities. The measure doesn’t apply to males’s sports activities groups.
The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit towards Nassau County final week, alleging Blakeman’s government order discriminates on the premise of gender identification.
The NYCLU is representing a Nassau County ladies’s curler derby league that welcomes trans ladies and can be barred from utilizing the county’s amenities by Blakeman’s government order.
“Trans individuals who play sports activities want help and affirmation, to not be a political goal,” NYCLU lawyer Gabriella Larios stated in a press release. “Nassau County’s cynical try and shut them out of public areas is a blatant violation of our state’s civil and human rights legal guidelines.”
Blakeman stated Monday that the identical authorized workforce defending towards James’ “stop and desist” letter shall be combating the NYCLU’s lawsuit.
Kilmnick of the New York LGBT Community stated athletic governing our bodies ought to be free to find out their very own requirements on the query of how and whether or not trans ladies ought to compete towards cisgender ladies, not the federal government.
“It’s very harmful when the federal government begins to ban teams of individuals and tells them what they’ll and can’t do,” Kilmnick stated. “We’ve already gone down that highway in our historical past, and it’s harmful to repeat that.”