It was March — Women’s History Month — when Republican Rep. Laurel Libby stepped to a lectern at a State House press conference to decry Maine’s policies on transgender athletes.
“We find ourselves in a battle to preserve the very definition of what it means to be a woman,” she said.
Flanked by female Republican colleagues clad in white in honor of suffragettes from more than a century ago, Libby pronounced that transgender athletes are a threat to women’s hard-earned rights.
“Today, we are declaring that we will not stand idly by and allow those rights to be stripped away in exchange for an empty, woke ideology that celebrates the mediocre over true womanhood,” Libby said.
Just a couple weeks before, Libby had thrust Maine into the national spotlight. She posted the photo of a transgender high school pole vaulting champion on social media and criticized the athlete for “dominating girls’ sports.” The Trump administration is now suing the state for allegedly violating Title IX. At the press conference, Libby took aim at Maine policies that allow transgender female athletes to compete.
“Title IX is not being upheld,” she said. “Our girls are not seeing a fair and level playing field, and that is what’s at stake here.”
But critics say the movement to ban transgender athletes from girls’ sports doesn’t have anything to do with fairness.
“This is not about protecting women,” said Shiwali Patel, the senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center.
“It really is about targeting a group of people — you know, dehumanizing trans people and stripping them of protections — and not doing anything to address the actual gender inequities in sports,” she said.
Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding and applies to activities including sports. Patel said the law has done a lot to bolster equity for women and girls since it was passed more than 50 years ago, but there are still disparities. Girls in U.S. high schools have about a million fewer roster positions than boys, and women in college have nearly 60,000 fewer opportunities to participate.
And equity advocates say it’s a problem that’s persisted for years.
“There are still so many colleges and universities that are not fully complying with Title IX, and many people are not aware of that,” said Pam Seidenman, the founder of Accelerate Equity, which tracks gender equity in college sports using federal data.
When comparing the percentage of female students to male students, Seidenman said Maine colleges are short more than 1,600 roster spots for women athletes.
“If people do have a sincere concern about increasing equity, increasing opportunities to play sports is really the most impactful thing that people can do,” she said.
Funding discrepancies are another measure of inequity.
While data compiled by Accelerate Equity show spending at some Maine colleges is more equitable than others, collectively there’s a gap of more than $6 million between men’s and women’s athletic programs. In one recent prominent case, six female coaches sued Colby College for unequal pay. The case was ultimately settled.
“The routine pay gap that women coaches and coaches of women’s teams have had over the span of 50 years is really indicative of a pattern of discrimination that schools need to be held accountable for,” said Ellen Staurowsky, a professor in sports media at Ithaca College.
She’s puzzled by the lack of outrage over the routine discrimination women experience in areas such as pay, team spending and roster spots.
“That’s the issue that needs to be addressed here,” Staurowsky said. “Is that we do have sex discrimination in this system that is already robbing hundreds and thousands of women of opportunities, and none of that has anything to do with transgender women athletes.”
Staurowsky said the focus on transgender athletes is also misplaced because there are so few of them. The president of the NCAA has estimated there are fewer than 10 among the half million college athletes nationwide. And the Maine Principals’ Association has said only two transgender athletes competed in girls high school sports this year.
The Maine Human Rights Commission’s executive director, Kit Thomson Crossman, can’t recall any cases involving transgender athletes.
“I have talked to my commission counsel who’s been here for over a decade,” Crossman said. “Between the two of us, we do not remember a case that was based on a transgender athlete either experiencing discrimination or somebody filing a complaint because there was a transgender athlete on their sports team.”
“I know it’s a few people,” assistant Maine House Republican leader Katrina Smith said. “I think it could be more in the coming years, and so that’s why it’s so important to tackle it right now.”
Smith said the unfairness created by Maine’s transgender policies only compounds the barriers women and girls face in scholastic sports.
“And so then when you’re adding transgender athletes into the mix, I think you see that girls are working even harder to be recognized for the skills that they have or for the accomplishments that they want to achieve,” she said.
Smith and her Republican colleagues are sponsoring bills that seek to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports. She said she’d like to see the issue resolved.
Opponents to transgender bans say they’d like the same — so that the focus can be on what they say are the actual disparities women and girls face in athletics.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
