New York women’s roller derby team sues county over ‘transphobic’ rule
For years, New York’s Long Island Roller Rebels have welcomed transgender women to strap on skates and body padding and join their women’s roller derby team.
Now, under an executive order issued this month by Nassau county on Long Island, if they want to book a county-run park or athletics facility they must ask each member what sex was marked on their original birth certificate, and expel any teammates who were not designated female.
The Roller Rebels say this is invasive and illegal discrimination under New York law, and, although they know of at least one transgender teammate, they simply do not know or care to inquire what their members’ birth certificates say.
“It’s gross,” said Amanda Urena, a Roller Rebel known on the rink by their derby name Curly Fry. “We don’t want to police our players’ bodies. That’s just not for us to do.”
Republican politicians in at least 23 US states have advanced scores of laws and rules in recent years restricting transgender athletes from joining girls’ or women’s teams as part of a broader legislative effort that includes restricting access to some gender-affirming medical treatments and sexsegregated toilets.
Such an order is rare in New York, one of the 22 US states that explicitly forbids discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
Last week, the Roller Rebels, represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, sued the county executive, Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who announced his order at a 22 February press conference in Nassau county, a mostly suburban chunk of Long Island adjacent to New York City.
His order forbids the county’s department of parks, recreation & museums from issuing event permits to girls’ and women’s sports teams that cannot attest that all their members were designated female at birth.
Blakeman says his order, the legality of which is now being weighed by at least two courts, is needed to protect girls and women who are not transgender. The order does not prevent transgender athletes from playing on mixed teams at county facilities, nor from forming transgender-only teams or leagues. Nor does it forbid a transgender woman from joining a men’s team, should both the athlete and the team want that.
Blakeman disagrees with the International Olympic Committee’s 2021 guidance, which said that there must be “no presumption of advantage” based on an athlete’s physical appearance or gender identity. The guidance says any sport’s eligibility criteria should be based on “robust and peer-reviewed research”, and that this will probably vary between different sports.
Days after Blakeman issued the order, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, wrote to demand he rescind it or face legal consequences, calling it “transphobic and blatantly illegal”. Blakeman has since sued James.
In 2020, the US supreme court ruled that discrimination on the basis of sexuality or gender identity amounts to illegal sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.
Gabriella Larios, an NYCLU attorney representing the Roller Rebels in the New York supreme court, said of Nassau’s move: “This is a policy that is purely designed to alienate and stigmatize transgender people who just want to play sports with their friends.”
The Roller Rebel players note that women who are not transgender can and do injure other athletes, especially in boisterous contact sports like roller derby, which involves blocking and passing opponents in high-speed laps.
“I have competed with assigned-female-at-birth women who are 6ft 2in before they put their skates on,” said Cat Carroll, a Roller Rebels coach known on the rink as Catastrophic Danger. “I have seen injuries caused by 5ft women. We have rules for safety.”