NY Roller Derby League Moves to Jam Blakeman Transgender Ban

The Long Island Roller Rebels are suing Nassau County after executive Bruce Blakeman banned female sports teams from using county facilities if they include transgender players. The case turns on whether Title IX applies outside educational settings and whether New York's own gender identity protections override local policy. Legal experts say the county's position is weak.

A community league, locked out of a hundred venues

Before we get into the legal arguments, I want to stay with the Roller Rebels for a moment, because what has happened to them is both mundane and genuinely shocking. Thirty-seven people who play roller derby together. They include transgender, intersex, and gender-expansive women. They held their games at county facilities, the way community sports leagues do. Then in 2024, Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman made that impossible.

The league's president, Amanda Urena, described what followed: scrambling for non-county venues, finding them limited, finding scheduling a mess, finding participation harder. The Rebels formally requested access to three county park sites. The county indicated it would deny them and has not even sent an official refusal. They are just left hanging, over a hundred facilities closed to them, because they chose not to throw their transgender teammates out.

That is the reality behind the legal briefs. A community group, trying to play a sport, told they are unwelcome in the parks their own taxes fund.

What Blakeman's law actually does

Blakeman's ban requires leagues and teams requesting county facility access to designate themselves as male, female, or co-ed. Any team designating as female cannot use county facilities if it allows transgender women to participate. Blakeman initially implemented this as an executive order and later enacted it as county law.

His office did not respond to Bloomberg Law's multiple requests for comment, which tells you something about the confidence behind the policy.

The justification he has offered is Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in educational programmes. The stretch here is considerable. Title IX was written for schools. Its text refers to "any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Nassau County argues that because it receives federal funds, Title IX governs its recreational parks. Legal scholars are not persuaded. Kara Ingelhart of Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law points out that the word "education" in the statute modifies "program" and "activity," and that it is not common practice to bring public recreational programmes under Title IX unless they are connected to schools.

The New York Civil Liberties Union's Gabriella Larios, who represents the Rebels, put it plainly: the law "only applies in the context of athletics in county parks facilities where you largely have organizations and teams of different kinds playing recreational sports." She described the purpose of the law as "divorced from the reality of who is playing sports at Nassau County facilities," and called it "a way to score political trust and bully transgender people."

I think she is right on both counts.

The legal picture is not as complicated as the county wants it to appear

Nassau won the first round at trial level. Both the Rebels' lawsuit and the New York Attorney General Letitia James's separate challenge were dismissed. The cases are now heading to the Second Appellate Department, and the legal consensus does not favour the county.

Elana Redfield of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law said the law is "clearly not in Nassau County's favor." The reason is straightforward: New York state civil rights law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity in places of public accommodation. Those protections sit above county policy. Jodi Balsam of Brooklyn Law School's Sports Law Clinic agreed, saying the roller derby plaintiffs and the attorney general "have a fairly strong argument that Nassau County can't somehow constrain or limit those human rights laws protections."

The county has also invoked the Supreme Court's recent ruling in West Virginia v. B.P.J., which held that states can ban transgender girls and women from competing on female school sports teams. But as multiple legal experts note, that ruling was about schools and the specific context of interscholastic athletic competition. It did not address county parks. It did not address recreational sports leagues. And it explicitly did not say whether states are required to exclude transgender athletes, only that they are permitted to do so in educational settings. Nassau County is trying to use a narrow Supreme Court ruling as a broad licence to exclude, and the law does not support that reading.

What it tells us that the Roller Rebels are here at all

I keep coming back to a question that this case raises clearly. The institutions most willing to go to court for transgender athletes are the ones without Olympic budgets or television contracts. It is not the major professional leagues, not the Olympic committees, not the wealthy governing bodies. It is a 37-member community roller derby league in Long Island, who looked at the cost of fighting Nassau County in court and decided their teammates were worth it.

That contrast is worth noting. The most powerful sporting organisations in the world have, with some exceptions, been either slow or actively hostile when it comes to trans inclusion. The Roller Rebels did not deliberate for years or commission a working group. They included transgender women because transgender women are women, and when the county told them that was unacceptable, they sued.

There is something genuinely moving about that. These are not people with resources. They are people with principle.

The broader pattern

Blakeman is Donald Trump's close ally and, as Bloomberg Law notes, his policy aligns with White House efforts to roll back transgender rights, including withdrawing funding from educational programmes that allow transgender women to compete on female teams. This Nassau County ban is part of that same political project, presented in legal language about Title IX to give it a veneer of statutory authority it probably does not have.

Larios has said she hopes the appellate court will issue a definitive ruling on the merits. So do I. Because the argument that a county can use federal education law to exclude transgender women from recreational park facilities, in a state that explicitly prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, needs to be addressed squarely and rejected clearly.

The Rebels are doing the work. The law, as best anyone can read it, is on their side. This autumn's hearing cannot come soon enough.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Expert, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.