Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills clashed with President Donald Trump at a White House occasion Friday over her state’s opposition to his govt order in search of to bar transgender pupil athletes from taking part in on ladies’ sports activities groups.
While the president was addressing a bipartisan group of governors, he stopped to single out Mills. “Is Maine here?” Trump requested, “the governor of Maine?” “Yeah,” she responded from throughout the room. “I’m here.”
Trump had been rambling about “men playing in women’s sports” and inaccurately retelling the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who acquired anti-trans hate for competing within the girls’s cohort on the Paris Olympics, although she herself just isn’t transgender or intersex.
“Are you not going to comply with it,” Trump requested Mills, referring to his govt order. “I’m complying with the state and federal laws,” she responded rapidly. “Well I am, we are the federal law,” Trump stated earlier than threatening to withhold Maine’s federal funding if Mills and different leaders in her state didn’t comply.
In early February, the Maine Principals’ Association, the physique that governs college sports activities within the state, introduced it could proceed to permit transgender feminine athletes to compete, saying that Trump’s govt order conflicts with the Maine Human Rights Act.
“See you in court,” Mills informed Trump in a uncommon act of public defiance to the president’s face by Democratic lawmakers. “Good, I’ll see you in court,” he responded. “I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”
While transient, the alternate has garnered nationwide consideration because the Democratic Party tries to determine how to reply to the Trump administration’s persistent upending of long-held federal requirements.
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Trump’s govt order, which notes a number of occasions within the textual content that it’ll “protect” girls, used Title IX to justify excluding transgender athletes from taking part in on the sports activities group that matches their gender id (although transgender boys and males are notably absent from the language). This is a a lot totally different interpretation from former president Joe Biden’s administration. In 2024, Biden finalized new Title IX guidelines barring faculties from discriminating towards transgender college students.
According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association President Charlie Baker, who testified in entrance of a Senate panel in December, there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes that he’s conscious of who presently compete in school sports activities and, nationally, simply round 1 p.c of adults determine as transgender, in keeping with the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law—a actuality that highlights the outsized fixation from the Trump administration.