Non-Binary Candidates Sue Brooklyn Democrat Party for Requiring Gender Designation

A group of “non-binary” individuals who claim they are neither male or female are suing to remove rules which were adopted by the Democrat party to boost the participation and influence of women.

“For me as a trans person trying to engage with local politics, it was disheartening that there were only two options at county level,” said Derek Gaskill, who is described in the website report as “trans masculine.”

“You have to declare that you’re male or female,” Gaskill said.

The suit seeks to have the party drop the gender designations, according to the BrooklynPaper.com website:

The six Brooklynites running for county committee membership of the party — the lowest rung of elected office — allege that the party and the government body violated their right to due process and equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, according to the April 3 lawsuit.

Gaskill and his fellow plaintiffs — who are vying to represent sections of Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant — all filled out petitions in March with signatures from local voters to run for county committee in the June and November elections. However, they left the gender field blank because the sheets only had the options of male or female.

They allege that the Board of Elections then filled out the gender designation without their consent, assigning them false genders based off of their names.

“That the KCDCC would vote to rescind a sex parity rule as it applies to top leadership positions while maintaining a similarly inequitable rule for the lowest, broadest, and most democratic level of public engagement reflects arbitrary and capricious standards of rulemaking that adversely and disproportionately impact the non-binary, intersex, and transgender county committee members at the ground floor of the organization,” the suit says.

“They identify across a spectrum of gender non-conforming identities, including non-binary, genderfluid, genderqueer, or transgender, according to the lawsuit, which was organized by the reform-oriented club New Kings Democrats,” BrooklynPaper.com reports.

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