DOJ slaps Title IX lawsuit on Maine over refusal to ban trans athletes in ladies’s sports activities

Legal professional Common Pam Bondi introduced a civil lawsuit towards the state of Maine Wednesday over officers’ refusal to adjust to the Trump administration’s insurance policies barring transgender feminine opponents from women’ and ladies’s sports activities.

The Justice Division is accusing Maine of flouting Title IX, which bars sex-based discrimination in teaching programs that garner federal funding.

“It’s not solely a difficulty in sports activities, it’s a public security subject,” Bondi informed reporters. “These boys are allowed to go within the ladies’s restroom. They’re allowed to go within the ladies’s dressing room and get absolutely bare and alter … in entrance of those younger ladies.”

“We’re additionally contemplating whether or not to retroactively pull all of the funding they’ve obtained for not complying prior to now,” the AG added.

President Trump signed an govt order on Feb. 5 directing the Training Division to “take all acceptable motion to affirmatively defend all-female athletic alternatives and all-female locker rooms” and clarify “that girls’s sports activities are reserved for ladies” and settle excellent lawsuits in a fashion “according to this coverage.”

Days later, a transgender competitor from Cumberland’s Greely Excessive Faculty — competing beneath the identify “Katie” — received the Class B women’ state championship in pole vaulting.

That very same week, Trump clashed with Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills throughout a White Home occasion, chiding that she’d “higher comply” with the order.

A defiant Mills shot again, “See you in courtroom.”

The Trump administration had warned Maine, California and Minnesota earlier this 12 months that it might “not tolerate state officers who ignore federal regulation.”

The Training Division later opened a civil rights probe into Maine and Trump demanded a “full-throated” apology from Mills after UMS, a community of eight public universities within the state, agreed to adjust to the order.

“The state of Maine is discriminating towards ladies by failing to guard ladies and ladies’s sports activities,” Bondi mentioned Wednesday. “Fairly fundamental stuff. This can be a violation of Title IX. The Division of Justice is not going to sit by when ladies are discriminated towards in sports activities.”

“Now we have exhausted each different treatment,” the AG defined. “We tried to get Maine to conform. We don’t like standing up right here and submitting lawsuits, we need to get states to adjust to us.”

“Right now is the most recent, anticipated salvo in an unprecedented marketing campaign to strain the State of Maine to disregard the Structure and abandon the rule of regulation,” Mills responded in an announcement.

“This matter has by no means been about college sports activities or the safety of girls and women, as has been claimed, it’s about states’ rights and defending the rule of regulation towards a federal authorities bent on imposing its will, as an alternative of upholding the regulation.”

Bondi was joined by Training Secretary Linda McMahon, and former faculty swimmer-turned-conservative activist Riley Gaines.

“The Trump administration couldn’t be any clearer to all state sports activities leagues and academic establishments,” McMahon burdened. “We take the violations of girls’s civil rights very significantly. I’ve three granddaughters, and I need to ensure that they’re handled pretty.”

Final month, the Division of Training wrapped up its probe of Maine and referred its findings to the DOJ.

The DOJ had additionally minimize $1.5 million in federal grants for Maine’s Division of Corrections, and the Division of Agriculture introduced that it was additionally pulling funds in protest of the state’s dealing with of the transgender subject.

State officers have sued the Trump administration over the funding freezes.

“Let this be a discover [to] California, Minnesota [and] the likes thereof — if you don’t adjust to federal regulation, you don’t get to reap the advantages of complying with federal regulation. After all, a kind of advantages being receiving federal funds,” Gaines warned.

State Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Minot), who has opposed Maine’s insurance policies on transgender athletes in ladies’s sports activities, slammed her state for refusing to budge.

“Maine Democrats have doubled down on their far-left agenda and now our college students and households stand poised to lose lots of of tens of millions in federal funding,” she mentioned in an announcement.

“Their radical gender ideology is endangering the continued existence of girls’s sports activities and penalizing Maine college students, towards the desire of Maine residents.”