In announcing a controversial sports ban targeting transgender girls and women, Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman didn’t offer any examples involving incidents on Long Island.
He said he wasn’t aware of any such issues in Nassau County as he introduced an executive order blocking transgender girls and women from competing in leagues or on teams designated for females at his county’s approximately 100 athletic facilities.
“We wanted to get ahead of the curve,” Blakeman, a Republican elected in 2021, said Thursday during a news conference in Mineola, during which he touted his order as a protection against competitive disadvantages.
That Blakeman couldn’t cite any specific complaints in Nassau County spoke volumes to local LGBTQ advocates who believe the politician is going to extreme efforts to chase a non-issue.
In 2022, a study released by the UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute found that about 0.5% of U.S. adults, or 1.3 million, identified as transgender. That same research determined that about 1.4% of teengers between ages 13 and 17, or 300,000, identified as transgender.
“We’re talking about 17,000 people here on Long Island,” Juli Grey-Owens, executive director of the non-profit Gender Equality New York, told the Daily News. “Now, the other question is how many trans people actually play sports, which is really going to decrease that number greatly.”
Joanna Harper, who researched and authored a 2019 book, “Sporting Gender,” about transgender athletes, estimated in 2021 there were at least 50 transgender women on female teams in the U.S.
How many transgender athletes compete at U.S. high schools remains practically impossible to calculate, considering schools largely don’t keep records of those demographics.
“I don’t think that they record it because it’s not a big deal,” David Kilmnick, whose LGBT Network represents Long Island and Queens, told The News. “The LGBT community’s not even counted on the census, so I don’t think we’re going to be counted on rosters as a category.”
On Thursday, Blakeman said he didn’t know how many transgender athletes compete in Nassau County but suggested between 0.5% and 1% of the county’s population identifies as transgender.
Blakeman also said he knows “of no policy in the state that would strike” his executive order down. Attorney general Letitia James and the New York Civil Liberties Union both said they are evaluating legal options.
“[The executive order] discriminates, on its face, on the basis of gender identity,” Bobby Hodgson, the NYCLU’s director of LGBTQ rights litigation, told The News.
“We have a New York State human rights law that says, in public accommodations, you cannot discriminate on the basis of gender identity, and we have a New York State civil rights law … that says state institutions and municipalities and localities cannot discriminate on the basis of gender identity.”
During his address Thursday, Blakeman briefly referenced a women’s basketball game in which an opposing coach allegedly forfeited against a team with a transgender athlete. Asked if that game occurred in Nassau County, Blakeman replied, “I believe that was in Connecticut.”
“There have been no instances or issues whatsoever on Long Island or anywhere close,” Kilmnick said. “It’s a made-up issue. Essentially what this amounts to is a political stunt. … For an elected official to stand up there and say, ‘Here is the solution to something that’s not a problem’ is quite alarming.”
