Maine Public Schools Are Supporting Trans Student Athletes, So Trump Is Investigating…Again
Hours after state public school officials refused to comply with Trump’s anti-trans executive order, the Department of Education launched an investigation.
It’s been a month since President Trump publicly threatened Maine Governor Janet Mills over her state’s refusal to implement his executive order banning trans athletes from women’s sports, and the saga is only ramping up. On Friday, Maine public schools took a stand against the president when the Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees the state’s high school sports teams, declared it would not abide by the ban. Instead, Maine’s public high schools will retain their current inclusion policy, which allows trans athletes to participate on sports teams that match their gender identities if they so choose.
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However, just hours after the Principals’ Association made its decision public, the Department of Education launched an investigation into the state over its trans inclusion policies—its second in the last month. This time, the agency says it’s investigating claims that dozens of Maine public schools withheld information about students’ gender transitions from their parents, a violation of federal law.
According to a Friday press release, the agency is investigating Maine’s state-level Department of Education for potentially “violating or misusing” FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, by “maintaining policies that infringe on parents’ rights.” In the press release, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon claimed that “teachers and school counselors in Maine are reportedly encouraging and helping students to undergo so-called ‘gender transitions’ while keeping parents in the dark.”
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The new investigation comes just over two weeks after an earlier investigation, led by the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), found Maine’s Department of Education, as well as the Maine Principals’ Association, in violation of Title IX for supposed sex-based discrimination over its policy of allowing trans athletes to compete on women’s sports teams. At the time, HHS gave Maine’s public schools ten days to change their policies and ordered the state to return over $180,000 in federal funding.
While the four-day HHS investigation included little concrete evidence, its claims of discrimination rested on a report that a trans teenager from Greely High School had won a girls’ track meet. The report came from an unconfirmed Facebook post by Republican State Representative Laurel Libby, which included the name and photo of a child who she claimed was the transgender athlete in question. Libby was later censured by the state legislature when she refused to remove or apologize for the post.
Maine’s Administrative School District 51, which includes Greely High School and was named in the Title IX investigation, has also said it will not enforce a ban on transgender athletes. In a letter to the community, the district said it will “continue to follow state law and the Maine Human Rights Act,” which protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
The Maine Principals’ Association has previously argued that, because it does not receive federal funding, it should be exempt from obligations to follow the federal ban on trans athletes. Speaking to the Associated Press on Friday, the Principals’ Association similarly cited Maine’s Human Rights Act, stating it was “bound by law” to maintain a policy of inclusion for trans athletes.
The second investigation is ongoing, and marks the latest in a weeks-long battle between the Trump administration and Maine officials over whether the state will implement his trans athlete ban. The saga began back in February, when Trump berated Governor Mills during a meeting with all 50 governors, threatening that her refusal to implement the ban would end her political career. The Department of Education launched its first investigation into the state just hours after this altercation.
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Last week, the Trump administration briefly appeared successful at forcing Maine into compliance when the state’s public university system announced it had banned athletes from participating in women’s sports. But true to Mills’s word, the state’s public schools have vowed to prioritize state law. Now, they’ll face a second investigation—and possibly additional funding cuts.
