Transgender Rights Are Being Attacked on Multiple Fronts
1.23.2025
Last June – during Pride Month – Nassau County banned sports leagues that allow transgender women and girls from using county facilities, effectively banning transgender people from local parks and recreational areas.
Across the United States, there are an increasing number of challenges to transgender people participating in public life, including in schools, on sports teams, and in medicine. A panel hosted by the LGBTQ+ Law Section of the New York State Bar Association reviewed the many legal challenges transgender Americans are facing on both the state and national level.
The speakers were:
- Robert Hodgson, assistant legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
- Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
Nicholas Loza, programming chair for the LGBTQ+ Law Section and an associate at Cammisa Markel, moderated the session. It was the first in-person panel for the LGBTQ+ Law Section at the New York State Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.
“The last three or four years, there’s been an unprecedented escalation in attacks against trans people generally, but specifically focused on trans youth,” said Seldin, adding half of U.S. states enacted a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth by 2023 – even if a child, their parents, and their doctor all agree that such care is safe and necessary.
The New York Civil Liberties Union is challenging the ban in Nassau County on behalf of the Long Island Roller Rebels, an adult roller derby team. While New York State has laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, Nassau County has claimed that federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex supersedes that. The lawsuit is ongoing.
“We said Nassau County has created a scheme that identifies transgender people and excludes them from participation in public accommodations – that is a violation of our state’s laws,” said Hodgson. “Their big argument essentially is ‘we think in order to comply with Title IX, we are required to do this and therefore federal law preempts in this context.’”
Hodgson added that this is a tactic jurisdictions are adopting to try to override state protections and is increasingly likely under the new federal administration.
The panelists also discussed discrimination in schools such as teachers not using a transgender student’s name and pronouns. While schools across the state and in New York City have policies prohibiting that, enforcing it is another ongoing issue.
“That’s the case in terms of antidiscrimination law and advocacy across many different protective categories,” said Hodgson. “We can have good policy and good laws on the books, but achieving some sort of protective quality is a constant challenge.”
Hodgson noted that when the New York State Education Department first published guidelines for school districts in 2013, there was little pushback. Only in the past few years have challenges and noncompliance greatly increased.
“This can feel like a niche subject,” said Seldin. “We’re talking about a couple of thousand kids nationally that these kind of [transition] restrictions would affect… But really these cases are not just about trans youth, they’re about what is the relationship between the people and its government with respect to how we organize and live our lives.”
