Maine’s Human Rights Commission sued five school districts that recently passed policies banning transgender students from playing sports and using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, claiming they violate state law.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday in Kennebec County Superior Court, asks a judge to order that the districts repeal what the commission describes as discriminatory policies, all of which were passed after the Trump administration began pressuring Maine last winter to ban transgender athletes from girls sports teams.
The districts named as defendants are Maine School Administrative District 70, in the Aroostook County town of Hodgdon; Regional School Unit 24, in the Hancock County town of Sullivan; RSU 73, in the Androscoggin County town of Livermore Falls; the Baileyville School District in Washington County; and the Richmond School Department in Sagadahoc County.
Between April and October, those five districts adopted policies aligned with Republican President Donald Trump’s priorities, such as barring transgender students from bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic teams and recognizing “only two sexes: biological male and biological female,” according to the court filing. (Others across the state are considering similar actions.)
This is the first time in recent memory that the commission, a quasi-state agency that enforces Maine’s Human Rights Act, has gone straight to court to enforce the law instead of responding to a complaint. The request for a judge to declare that the districts are breaking state law draws the state courts into an issue that affects a small number of students but has sharply divided Maine communities since Trump took office.
“Complaints filed at the Commission are confidential while they are pending, and a case might be pending here for up to two years. That wouldn’t address the rights of trans and gender non-conforming students to participate fully in their school lives today,” the commission’s executive director, Kit Thomson Crossman, said in a statement.
The increasing number of school boards contemplating these policies could intimidate transgender students and their families from filing a complaint, the commission argued in its complaint.
Representatives from the five school districts could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday afternoon.
The push among school boards began shortly after the president’s high-profile confrontation earlier this year with Democratic Gov. Janet Mills at the White House, in which she refused to comply with his demand that Maine change its policy allowing transgender girls to compete in girls sports, saying it would violate the Maine Human Rights Act. The Trump administration has since filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming its policy violates Title IX, the landmark federal anti-discrimination law. (Experts have called that interpretation legally dubious.)
Conservative groups pushing for policy change across Maine had downplayed the risk of lawsuits against school boards, positing that the Trump administration’s view on Title IX overruled the state law. Heidi Sampson, a former Republican lawmaker from Alfred who has prominently campaigned against the rights of transgender students, said school boards had “a green light” after the Maine Human Rights Commission said it had no plans to go to court.
That changed this week. The recently passed policies that violate state law, the commission argued in a court filing.
It pointed to a ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 2014 that stated that schools could not prevent transgender students from using the restroom that reflects their gender identity because it would violate the Maine Human Rights Act. Since then, the Maine Human Rights Commission has “held that this same nondiscrimination” applies to sports teams, the complaint states.
The recent policies “create a hostile educational environment for gender-nonconforming students in each of their respective public school districts and throughout the State of Maine,” two lawyers for the commission wrote in the filing. They interfere with transgender students’ ability to fully access their education, and could intimidate them from students exercising their rights, the lawyer argued.
The commission said adults have made comments in public meetings threatening physical harm against students they believe are transgender and competing in sports teams that do not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. The agency also received an email from an adult who used a derogatory term to express a desire to “make an example out of” a transgender child in the third grade, and wished the child and his parents would “get ‘in a car fire,’” according to the complaint.
While the complaint alluded to other districts that are considering changing their policies to align with the Trump administration’s agenda, the tide of school districts contemplating such changes has slowed recently.
In St. George, the select board voted against banning a transgender child from playing on a girls recreational basketball team after a robust assertion by the Human Rights Commission’s counsel Colin Hurd that such a move would be illegal. The movement also failed to flip several school boards in November’s elections.
Conservatives are likely to continue pushing to remove trans students from girls sports teams, including via a citizens’ initiative that could place the question of transgender student rights on ballots statewide in 2026.
