The Trump Department of Justice is suing Maine over its flouting of a national prohibition on men in women’s sports, kicking off the next phase of progressive governor Janet Mills’s fight with the administration on the transgender issue.
The lawsuit accuses Maine of violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funding, by continuing to allow transgender-identifying male athletes to compete in the women’s division.
“We have exhausted every other remedy,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wednesday of the legal action. “We tried to get Maine to comply. We don’t like standing up here and filing lawsuits, we want to get states to comply with us.”
Maine’s majority Democratic state government has been battling with Trump for months, since Mills informed him during a televised inauguration event in February that her state would not comply with his executive order banning men in women’s sports. Trump warned that they would litigate the matter in court if all else fails.
“The undeniable physiological differences between males and females provide boys with inherent advantages in strength, speed, and physicality that pre-determine the outcome of athletic contests,” the lawsuit reads.
In early April, the Trump administration notified Mills that there’d be a funding freeze on Maine, targeting “certain administrative and technological functions in schools,” in response to its lack of cooperation.
“You cannot openly violate federal law against discrimination in education and expect federal funding to continue unabated. Your defiance of federal law has cost your state, which is bound by Title IX in educational programming,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a letter to Mills. “This is only the beginning, though you are free to end it at any time by protecting women and girls in compliance with federal law.”
Maine responded by suing the Trump administration last week, marking the first legal challenge to the Trump administration’s efforts to protect the sanctity of women’s sports and enforce Title IX compliance.
Shortly before the original spat between Trump and Mills, GOP Maine state representative Laurel Libby publicly spoke out about the women’s sports issue. She wrote a Facebook post noting the disparity between a male high school pole vaulter’s performance in the boys’ versus the girls’ division. The male athlete, Soren Stark-Chessa, placed fifth in a boys’ competition last year and then won the girls’ state championship this year, leading Greely High School to win the state track-and-field championship by one point. House Democrats subsequently censured Libby for her post.
In March, Libby and six of her constituents in Auburn, Maine filed a federal lawsuit alleging that she had been unconstitutionally stripped of her right to speak and vote on the House floor.
“The State of Maine, through its Department of Education, is openly and defiantly flouting federal anti-discrimination law by enforcing policies that require girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions designated exclusively for girls,” the lawsuit said. “By prioritizing gender identity over biological reality, Maine’s policies deprive girl athletes of fair competition, deny them equal athletic opportunities, and expose them to heightened risks of physical injury and psychological harm.”
Riley Gaines, a female athlete and advocate for protecting women’s sports from male intrusion, stood alongside other parents and students from Maine who have criticized the state’s radical descent into disenfranchising women in their sports.
“The Department of Justice will not sit by when women are discriminated against in sports. This is about sports. This is also about these young women’s personal safety,” Bondi Wednesday. “I met many of these women throughout the past weeks and months, and what they have been through is horrific.”
In response, Mills vowed to keep resisting the Trump administration, while suggesting that she has always been a defender of women’s rights.
“My Administration and Maine’s Attorney General will vigorously defend our state against the action announced today from the Department of Justice,” she said.
Earlier in the week, she dismissed the scale of the issue of men invading women’s sports, insisting there had only been a few instances in her state.
“Because there are two, maybe two, trans athletes competing in Maine schools right now, they decided to shut off funding for the school nutrition program, the school lunch program, entirely,” Mills said in an interview on CBS affiliate WGME. “The law says if you don’t like what a state is doing over here, you can’t just take the funds away over here.”
The weekend following Libby’s post, the male high school pole vaulter she had written about won a Nordic ski competition, displacing a woman on the podium. Last winter, the Western Maine Conference named Stark-Chessa to its girls’ Nordic skiing all-conference team, one of only ten skiers to earn that recognition. Stark-Chessa has taken titles from female athletes across winter and summer sports. In running, he went from being average in boys’ races to winning the Fastest Sophomore Girl award at Maine’s largest high school cross-country race, in Belfast, Maine, in 2023.
High school senior Cassidy Carlisle of Presque Isle, Maine, thought nothing of it when she heard a male athlete had been making his way through the women’s Nordic skiing circuit.
“So I went to my first qualifier race, and I was competing against him,” Carlisle told National Review of Stark-Chessa. “I lost that race to him.”
They had both qualified for the Maine Nordic skiing team, but Carlisle was below him in the rankings. At an event in New Hampshire, she lost to him in the first race but beat him in the second race, which meant she’d get a head start for the third race.
“I was going up a hill, and I saw a Maine uniform pass me and immediately my heart sank, and I watched as he crossed the finish line ahead of me,” she said. “It was like, you have your competitors that you always want to beat, but in this moment, it was such a mixed feeling. Because I really shouldn’t have the competitive drive that I need to beat a biological male. It was so defeating.”
Carlisle has only defeated Stark-Chessa once. Every other time he has defeated her, she said.