May President Trump’s battle in opposition to Maine over transgender athletes be coming quickly to Massachusetts?
Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi sued Maine for Title IX violations and made clear on Wednesday that she might be concentrating on different states for permitting previously male trans athletes to compete in opposition to women and girls in sports activities, saying California and Minnesota “are the highest two that must be on discover.”
The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Affiliation additionally has a rule prohibiting discrimination in opposition to transgender athletes, and two extensively publicized incidents of ladies getting harm by transgender athletes have caught the administration’s consideration.
“Let at this time function warning to all states,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills mentioned in an announcement. “Maine is perhaps among the many first to attract the ire of the federal authorities on this approach, however we won’t be the final.”
Bondi – flanked by feminine athletes – launched a lawsuit in opposition to Maine on Wednesday for brazenly flaunting Trump’s order in opposition to transgender participation in women’ sports activities, outlining plans to strip the state of college funding and giving titles received by transgender athletes to feminine opponents.
The lawsuit cites a case the place a transgender athlete received a pole vaulting competitors on the observe and discipline state championships.
“I don’t care if it’s one, I don’t care if it’s two, I don’t care if it’s 100,” Bondi mentioned.
It was the boldest transfer but by the Trump administration to escalate the battle in opposition to trans athletes’ participation in women’ sports activities – a difficulty that helped contribute to Trump’s election victory final yr.
“This has been an enormous subject for him,” Bondi mentioned at a press convention. “Fairly easy, women play in women sports activities, boys play in boys sports activities. Girls play in girls’s sports activities, males play in males’s sports activities.”
The lawsuit comes after Mills, a Democrat, confronted the president a couple of months in the past in public throughout a governors’ assembly on the White Home..
“We’ll see you in courtroom,” Mills mentioned, prompting Trump to retort that he was assured of a authorized victory in opposition to Maine.
Whereas liberal Massachusetts could not but be in Bondi’s cross hairs, that day might come ahead of later, as Mills made clear in her assertion.
The weak and insular MIAA has refused to take motion to assist Trump’s govt order, as a substitute preserving a rule that would hold transgender athletes competing in opposition to girls and women.
That rule might additionally danger Massachusetts shedding hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in funding for education schemes down the road.
A couple of weeks in the past, the Division of Schooling introduced it was chopping off training funds from Maine for violating the Title IX legal guidelines prohibiting discrimination in opposition to girls, whereas the Division of Agriculture froze college lunch funding. The Justice Division additionally pulled greater than $1.5 billion in funding from Maine’s Division of Corrections.
Nationwide polling has persistently proven {that a} majority of Individuals don’t assist permitting previously male transgender athletes to compete in girls’s and women’ sports activities.
Solely 19% of Individuals again the notion of transgender girls competing in opposition to girls and women in faculty, the skilled ranks and the Olympics. Two thirds oppose the concept.
