Editorial | Challenging an unjust trans sports ban in New York | amNewYork

The ink bearing Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s signature on a county bill banning transgender athletes from certain competitions was barely dry Monday morning when state Attorney General Letitia James announced legal action seeking to stop the law from taking effect.

Blakeman and the Nassau County legislature rammed through the trans sports ban after his executive order to the same effect was successfully challenged and defeated in state court. While the legislation only impacts Nassau County, its enaction and the legal challenge have the potential to impact New York City — where at least one education council has already begun Sisyphean efforts to overturn the Department of Education’s gender equality policy for the city’s public schools.

This makes James’ legal challenge of Blakeman’s trans sports ban law so critical. James called the ban “discriminatory” even though the local law’s title, the “Fairness for Women and Girls in Sports Act,” feigned something more innocuous rather than damaging.

Blakeman and supporters of the law say the trans sports ban is about achieving fairness in competition based solely on the argument of physical genetics and biological development tendencies. Their argument, however, completely ignores — and thereby devalues — the transgender athletes’ personal identification. 

While they focus on the body, their ban forgets the soul of transgender athletes.

Shakespeare famously wrote, “This above all, to thine own self be true.” But under the trans athlete ban, a transgender girl or woman is not permitted to be true to themselves in competition. They are being asked instead to take on the role of a person with whom they do not identify.

Blakeman and the other ban supporters surely realize the difficulty and internal trauma many transgender Americans experience every day. A 2023 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that “81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42% of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56% have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.” 

Transgender people were also “significantly more likely to experience poor mental health during their lifetimes,” the study further noted. Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Research and Evaluation also found that transgender and gender-nonconforming youth were more likely to be diagnosed with mental health conditions than their cisgender peers.

We have heard nothing from transgender sports ban supporters as to how they can reconcile their prohibition with the mental and emotional impact such a ban would have on any competitor subject to it.

To be honest, why is there such a need for a ban at all when transgender youth comprise “a small part of the overall population in schools, and only about half of trans youth identify as girls“? Even that has yet to be adequately explained.

Laws in New York and the U.S. should protect people, not harm them. The trans sports ban is an unjust law, and James is right to challenge it.