Maine is refusing to back down over President Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans athletes from women’s sports.
According to Newsweek, the Department of Education (DOE) has referred Maine to the Department of Justice, after Maine Gov. Janet Mills has been at odds with the president since he took office in January.
Maine was asked to sign the Title IX agreement to ban men from participating in women’s sports in March by the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights.
In response, Maine’s attorney general’s office said in a statement Friday that they will not sign the agreement and that they are now “at an impasse.”
“We will not sign the Resolution Agreement, and we do not have revisions to counter purpose,” the Maine attorney general’s office said. “We agree that we are at an impasse.”
It goes on to say that “[n]othing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds. To the contrary, various federal courts have held that Title IX and/or the Equal Protection Clause require schools to allow such participation.”
The DOE has now referred Maine to the DOJ for further investigation, with one DOE official saying that Maine must defend its “discriminatory” practice before a judge.
Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the DOE, said in a statement that the department has given the state every chance to comply.
“The Department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” Trainor said.
The Maine Department of Education will now have to defend its discriminatory practices before a department administrative law judge and in a federal court against the Justice Department,” Trainor said. “Governor Mills would have done well to adhere to the wisdom embedded in the old idiom—be careful what you wish for. Now she will see the Trump Administration in court.”
