A county legislature in New York voted on Monday to bar transgender athletes from playing at county-owned facilities unless they compete on teams matching the gender they were assigned at birth or on coed teams.
The vote, in Nassau County on Long Island, followed months of debate after the county executive, Bruce Blakeman, issued an executive order in February instituting a similar ban. In May, a judge ruled that Mr. Blakeman did not have the authority to impose such a ban, a decision Mr. Blakeman is appealing.
That court found that only a legislative body could pass such a measure, and so the battle moved to the majority-Republican Nassau County Legislature, which voted 12 to 5 in favor of the ban (two legislators were absent). The bill now heads to Mr. Blakeman’s desk to be signed into law.
Over more than two hours of sometimes raucous discussion and public comment leading up to the vote, tensions ran high in the legislative chamber. Weighted accusations were traded and a number of unrelated issues discussed in a debate that illustrated how contentious the issue of transgender athletes has become.
The bill states that sports leagues or organizations that apply for permits to use county parks department facilities must designate their teams as male, female or coed based on members’ assigned sex at birth. It is primarily concerned with the participation of transgender women in women’s sports but would apply to all transgender children and adults.
Transgender advocates packed the chamber’s public seating, holding pink and purple signs that read “trans women are women.”
“This is not a transgender ban,” said John R. Ferretti Jr., a Republican legislator from Levittown, maintaining that transgender women could still compete, just in men’s or coed leagues.
Chants of “lies!” rippled through the audience.
Victoria LaGreca, a Nassau County lawyer, was called upon to defend the bill in front of the Legislature. While the New York State Human Rights Law extends protections to transgender people, Ms. LaGreca said that law was “diametrically opposed to federal law to protect women,” in reference to Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding.
Ms. LaGreca listed four examples of cases in which transgender girls had allegedly hurt girls they were competing against, though none had taken place in Nassau County. One example was from Ontario, Canada.
The fight in Nassau County, where high-profile Republicans including Caitlyn Jenner, a former Olympic athlete and reality television star who is transgender, have weighed in, comes amid a nationwide push by conservative lawmakers to restrict the rights of transgender people as part of their political strategies.
In a Siena College poll released in April, 66 percent of New York voters said that they believed that high school athletes ought to be required to compete in the gender category they were assigned at birth.
A study released in April and funded by the International Olympic Committee found that there were significant differences between transgender women and biological men when it came to athletic prowess. Transgender female athletes were also found to have lower jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness compared with women whose gender was assigned female at birth.
All the members of the Legislature’s Democratic minority criticized the bill, pointing to the broad swath of issues that could be addressed with the money that will instead go to toward defending the ban in court. But the most dramatic exchange came early in the discussion, during an interaction between Arnold W. Drucker, a Democratic legislator, and Ms. LaGreca.
Mr. Drucker compared barring transgender athletes from county facilities to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jewish people, saying it “was done over a manufactured fear and false narrative.”
“Aren’t we doing the same thing here?” he asked, to a round of applause from the gallery.
“Absolutely not,” Ms. LaGreca replied, calling the comparison “extremely insulting.”
Mr. Drucker’s Republican colleagues resoundingly rejected his comparison, with Mr. Ferretti going as far as to call on him to apologize to Mr. Blakeman.
The public comment period lasted over an hour, with only transgender advocates coming forward to implore the legislators to vote against the ban. No Nassau County residents testified in support of the ban.
Susan Gottehrer, the director of the Nassau County chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which was active in the push to have Mr. Blakeman’s original order struck down, also spoke during the comment period. Ms. Gottehrer noted that between 2015 and 2019, Nassau County spent $55 million on lawsuits.
“This is banning people from government property,” she said. “Let’s think very carefully before we do that.” She added: “We will see you in court.”
