Friday is Maine’s final deadline to ban transgender athletes from girls’ sports.
In a letter dated March 31, Bradley Burke, the regional director for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, said Maine has until the end of business on April 11 to inform the Trump administration of its compliance. Otherwise, Maine could face sanction or the case could be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice.
On March 19, the U.S. Department of Education notified its state counterpart of its alleged violation of Title IX. As evidence, the feds pointed to state law, the Maine Department of Education’s regulations and guidance to school districts, and the department’s relationship with the Maine Principals’ Association.
The Maine attorney general’s office acknowledged the state’s receipt of that notice the same day.
The initial 10-day deadline to comply has come and gone, and Burke wrote in his Monday letter that the Maine Department of Education has “clearly demonstrated” it is “refusing” to discuss the matter and that there’s no apparent resolution in sight.
If the case is referred to the Justice Department, Maine could face legal action, which U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has pledged.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has already referred its Title IX case to the Justice Department.
The looming deadline is the latest entry in the Trump administration’s weeks-old pressure campaign against Maine over the state’s policies toward transgender individuals.
In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports. That had an immediate impact nationally, with the NCAA changing its policy in response.
Maine was thrust into the center of the debate after state Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, made a now-infamous social media post targeting a transgender Greely High School athlete who won a girls’ track-and-field title.
Not long after that Trump singled out Maine during a Republican governors meeting in Washington. The next day Trump and Gov. Janet Mills crossed paths at an event at the White House. In a heated exchange, Trump pressed Mills on the state’s policy toward transgender athletes and the governor told the president that she would “see you in court.”
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Since then, six federal agencies have launched investigations into the state of Maine, Maine Department of Education, University of Maine System, Maine Principals’ Association and Greely High School in Cumberland. Those investigations have centered around an untested legal theory that allowing transgender athletes to compete on girls’ and women’s sports teams violates girls’ and women’s civil and equal opportunity rights under Title IX.
There are no transgender athletes competing on any UMaine System sports team. At the high school level, only two transgender athletes are competing during the current school year.
For the 2023-24 school year, about 45,000 students participated in high school sports in Maine, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. (That does count students who participated in two or more sports multiple times.)
Between 2013 and 2021, the Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees scholastic sports for 151 public and private schools, heard from 56 trans students wishing to participate on a high school sports team consistent with their gender identity, only four of whom were trans girls.
The outcome of these Title IX cases could risk millions in federal funds that flow into Maine.
Already, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has frozen funds that support programs that feed schoolchildren, children in day care, at-risk youth outside school hours and vulnerable adults. Maine is suing to prevent the freezing of those funds.
Separately this week Bondi, the attorney general, announced that the Trump administration was pulling $1.5 million in “nonessential funding” for the Maine prison system over a transgender inmate in a women’s prison.
The Trump administration also withdrew support for Maine Sea Grant in March, but the Commerce Department is supposed to be renegotiating the terms of those grants. More than 30 states, Puerto Rico and Guam participate in the national Sea Grant program. No other Sea Grant program has seen its funding cut.
The U.S. Department of Education launched a separate probe into its state counterpart over allegations that dozens of school districts are hiding students’ “gender plans” from parents in violation of the Family Educational Privacy Rights Act.
