Nonbinary candidates in Brooklyn sue over gender rules

Two masked gunmen interrupted a Brooklyn house party early Monday — one killing the owner and the other robbing more than a dozen people who were shooting dice, police sources said.

The victim, Kenny Mark, 48, answered a 2 a.m. knock on the door of his three-story apartment building on Pulaski St. near Nostrand Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant, police said.

At the door were the gunman, each dressed in dark clothing and wearing ski masks.

One gunman pulled Mark out of the apartment and forced him to sit down while his accomplice stepped inside to confront approximately 15 people using a pool table to play dice.

The accomplice robbed the crowd and snatched money off the pool table, sources said. The victim, meanwhile, apparently tried to fight back and was shot in the abdomen.

One man told the Daily News he heard arguing moments before the killing. “I thought they were people he lived with. By the time I started paying attention they were carrying him out on stretcher.”

The suspects are being sought.

A half-dozen gendernonconforming candidates are suing the Brooklyn Democratic Party and the city’s Board of Elections to end the practice of requiring people to identify as male or female to run for certain offices.

Six people running for the Brooklyn Democratic County Committee — the most local level of the national party — say the longstanding requirement is discriminatory.

“It’s exclusionary of so many expressions of gender. We don’t even need to list a gender at all,” plaintiff Nandani Bharrat, who identifies as gender-fluid, told the Daily News.

Citing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the city and state’s human rights laws, the suit would order Brooklyn’s Democratic County Committee to recognize the plaintiffs as candidates even if they don’t list a gender.

The suit was initiated in Brooklyn Supreme Court last week and organized by New Kings Democrats, a reformist political club.