Maine has found itself the surprising center of the nation’s debate over — and the Trump administration’s crusade against — transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
That position leaves the state, one of the smallest and least populous, vulnerable to weighty financial and social consequences as it takes on President Trump
It started with four words in February. “See you in court,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) told Trump at the White House in an exchange that followed public threats to her state’s funding.
The president pressed Mills to comply with his executive order to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, which she has argued violates a Maine anti-discrimination law. Trump says the state is violating Title IX, the federal civil rights law against sex discrimination, by allowing trans girls to compete.
Mills refused, and the backlash was swift.
The Education Department announced the same day an investigation into Maine over alleged Title IX violations. The Department of Health and Human Services, which recently began probing states and schools with transgender athletes, launched its own inquiry the following day.
Then came a series of actions against the state with less of a connection to the issue at hand. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration abruptly discontinued — and later agreed to renegotiate — funding for the Maine Sea Grant program, which bolsters the state’s coastal economy; the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funds for the state that a judge later ordered it to restore; Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek ordered two data collection contracts with Maine terminated; the Justice Department cut funding for several of the state corrections department’s grant programs.
“Evidence would support a conclusion that Maine is being treated disproportionately more harsh than other states when it comes to this direction of federal attention,” state Attorney General Aaron Frey (D) said in a recent interview.
Federal administration officials have, on several occasions, said other states allowing transgender students to participate in girls’ sports will face similar repercussions, and the Education Department last month opened Title IX investigations into schools and interscholastic sports organizations in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Washington state.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said this week that, outside of Maine, California and Minnesota are the “top two” states that “should be on notice,” citing their noncompliance with the Trump administration’s orders to ban trans athletes and state policies requiring prisons to house transgender inmates based on their gender identity, which violates another Trump executive order.
But the administration hasn’t yet subjected any other state to Maine-level scrutiny.
“I don’t think we’ve seen the same publicly antagonistic response from other states that we did from Governor Mills versus President Trump, and I think that was very intentional on her part,” said state Rep. Laurel Libby (R), whose Facebook post about a transgender high school studenthelped catapult the state to the frontline of the nation’s debate on trans athletes. “I haven’t seen other states have the same reaction that publicly, and I am sure that that plays into it.”
Democrats, who control both chambers of Maine’s state legislature, voted in February to censure Libby for the Facebook post, which included the student’s photos, name and deadname — the name they used before transitioning — without their knowledge or consent. The censure resolution, which the House adopted along party lines, said the Republican lawmaker used the student, who is a minor, “to advance her political agenda.”
Libby challenged her censure the following month in a federal lawsuit, arguing the action, which prevents her from voting on legislation or speaking on the floor, disenfranchises her constituents “in retaliation for protected speech on a highly important and hotly debated matter of public concern.” A Rhode Island judge denied Libby’s request for a preliminary injunction on Friday.
In an interview, Libby said she supports the Trump administration’s response to Maine’s defiance — and so do most of the roughly 9,000 people she represents in Southern Maine.
She stood alongside Bondi during a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, where the Justice Department announced a civil lawsuit against Maine’s Department of Education for what it said were willful violations of the federal civil rights law. Speaking before a throng of reporters, Libby said the federal government’s actions were supported by a recent University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll that found roughly 64 percent of Mainers opposed trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
National polls on the issue have yielded similar results: 79 percent of Americans surveyed in a New York Times/Ipsos poll published in February said transgender athletes should not be permitted to participate in women’s sports. A recent Pew Research Center survey found Americans have grown more supportive of policies restricting transgender rights overall, including ones that require athletes to compete on sports teams that match their birth sex.
“We need to make this right, and whether the solution comes from the federal government pulling funding until we stop discriminating against Maine women and girls or the solution comes legislatively, which is what it should be, Maine should correct this,” Libby told The Hill.
Republican state lawmakers in Maine introduced at least three separate bills this year to prevent schools from allowing transgender students to compete on girls’ sports teams, though none advanced out of committee.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted early last month to advance an unsuccessful nationwide ban that the state’s independent senator and two Democratic House members opposed. Collins later said her state’s handling of the issue contradicts the “spirit and intent” of Title IX.
By and large, officials on either side appear to have dug in their heels.
“This matter has never been about school sports or the protection of women and girls, as has been claimed, it is about states’ rights and defending the rule of law against a federal government bent on imposing its will,” Mills said this week after the Justice Department announced its lawsuit.
Ahead of the Education Department’s referral of its investigation to the Justice Department, Maine’s Assistant Attorney General Sarah A. Forster wrote in a letter to the department’s Office for Civil Rights that the state and federal governments “are at an impasse.”
Bondi, responding this week to criticism that the federal government is throwing its full weight at a state with just two known transgender girls in school sports, said, “I don’t care if it’s one, I don’t care if it’s two, I don’t care if it’s 100 — it’s going to stop, and it’s going to stop in every single state.”
Asked about next steps, Frey, Maine’s attorney general, said his office is prepared for what will likely be a contentious court battle with the Trump administration — one that could have far-reaching implications for Title IX. Federal courts have split over whether the law precludes transgender students from participating in sports that match their gender identity.
“We’re going to look at the rule of law as our guide and we’re also going to remind the Trump administration that it’s the rule of law that they are bound to as well. They don’t operate above the law,” Frey said.
“We will be in court,” he added, emphasizing the word “will” in a nod to Mills’s promise to Trump, “which will provide an opportunity for transparency, not only around what the federal government thinks is going on here, but also our ability to point out where, both as a matter of process and as a matter of substantive law, we believe Maine is on the right side of this.”
James Nussbaum, an attorney focused on higher education and sports law in Indiana, said the outcome of Maine’s battle with the Trump administration over transgender athletes won’t likely remain insular.
“I just don’t know how this doesn’t end up at the Supreme Court at some point, maybe especially with the government being involved,” he said.
In that case, “It would be hard to overstate how big the impact on Title IX would be,” Nussbaum said, “because how they interpret sex is going to have a lot broader implications than just transgender participation in athletics.”
