AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Legislature will hold public hearings this Thursday on a set of Republican bills that would overturn state rules that allow transgender girls to play scholastic sports according to their gender identity.
The hearings promise to bring hundreds of people to the State House to debate the culture-war issue that sparked a fight between Gov. Janet Mills and President Donald Trump. His administration is suing Maine in federal court while making an untested argument that the state’s policies violate Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex-based discrimination in schools.
The long-awaited hearings were scheduled Friday by the Democratic-led Legislature. The Judiciary Committee will take testimony starting at 9:30 a.m. next Thursday on eight Republican bills that would affect transgender Mainers, including five aimed squarely at scholastic sports. Testimony can be submitted online.
The most well-publicized bill, from Rep. Liz Caruso, R-Caratunk, would bar transgender girls from female sports sanctioned by public schools and colleges. It would reach beyond sports to mandate male- and female-only bathrooms with limited exceptions. The Legislature rejected a similar bill last year that went down along party lines in the House.
But this year is much different. Trump, a Republican, is unpopular in Democratic-led Maine, but two-thirds of the state’s voters agreed with his stance that transgender athletes should be barred from female sports in a March poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire. That mirrored overwhelming national surveys on the subject.
Trump used the issue to target Maine’s federal funding, with the president’s administration cited three cases of transgender athletes playing against girls. The state’s policies drew Trump’s attention after Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, made February social media posts singling out a transgender athlete that won an indoor track and field championship.
Many of the Trump administration’s actions against Maine have been reversed, including the freezing of school nutrition funds. A judge ruled in the state’s favor in the case, which resulted in a Friday settlement in which the federal government agreed to restore the funding. But the Justice Department’s sweeping case against Maine is still active.
“When confronted by the president of the United States, I told him I’d see him in court,” Mills said at a Friday news conference, referring to her White House exchange with Trump in February. “And we did see him in court, and we won.”
The Democratic governor signed a 2021 law that led to the state’s current transgender athlete policies. Mills has avoided taking a position on whether the Legislature should change the law, telling reporters in March that the issue was worth debating.
Her party looks reasonably united, with only two Democrats — Rep. Dave Rollins of Augusta and Dani O’Halloran of Brewer — bucking their party last month on a bill that would have added new gender identity protections to the Maine Constitution. Both of them said they generally oppose transgender athletes in girls sports.
