NYCLU asks court to suspend Nassau County's trans sports ban

The New York Civil Liberties Union argued Tuesday that a judge should suspend Nassau County’s sports ban on transgender women and girls.

The civil liberties group made its case in a court more than 10 weeks after Nassau County issued the ban, which forbids transgender women and girls from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity at about 100 county-run facilities.

The NYCLU has asked a Nassau County Supreme Court justice, Francis Ricigliano, to issue an order freezing the ban as litigation plays out.

In March, the civil liberties organization sued Nassau County, arguing that the ban violates state law. The NYCLU filed the complaint on behalf of a Nassau County women’s roller derby league.

The lawsuit said the league, the Long Island Roller Rebels, has at least one member who could be barred from playing under the ban. The complaint said the ban was issued against a “backdrop of clear statutory protections, regulations and guidance” preventing discrimination on the basis of gender identity in publicly operated athletic facilities.

The lawsuit cited a 2019 state law, the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, which “prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression” in public spaces.

The Democratic state lawmaker who wrote the 2019 law, Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal of Manhattan, has sided with the NYCLU.

“It’s very clear,” he said by phone Tuesday. “You can’t discriminate against New Yorkers — whether they be adults or children — based on their gender identity or expression.”

Nassau County, which tried unsuccessfully to move the case to federal court, has asked the state court to dismiss the complaint. The county has argued in court documents that the ban is supported by the protections for women enshrined in the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In recent decades, federal courts have sometimes applied the clause — with limited sweep — to questions of gender discrimination. The 14th Amendment, a broadly written Reconstruction-era amendment aimed at preventing racial discrimination, dictates that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

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