Five Maine school districts are now facing a lawsuit from the Maine Human Rights Commission (MHRC), filed on Monday after the districts voted to comply with federal Title IX anti-discrimination law by barring transgender-identifying males from girls’ sports and spaces.
The Maine Principals Association, which oversees school sports, and the Maine Department of Education have allowed student athletes to self-identify their genders, leading to a high profile show-down between state and federal authorities earlier this year.
The five districts facing a lawsuit from the MHRC are Maine School Administrative District (MSAD) 70, serving Hodgdon; Regional School Unit (RSU) 24, serving Sullivan; RSU 73, serving Livermore Falls; the Baileyville School Department; and the Richmond School Department.
President Donald Trump’s February executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” established that federal Title IX law requires schools to designate private spaces and sports by biological sex rather than self-selected gender identity.
That order sparked a legal battle between Maine and the federal government over the state’s liberal transgender policies and left school districts to choose between following federal law or adhering to the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA), which establishes self-selected gender identity as a protected class.
In the months following President Trump’s order, a few intrepid school boards have slowly voted to alter their policies to bar males from girls’ sports. Until Monday, no districts faced any repercussions from the state for voting to comply with federal law, emboldening more school boards to take action.
According to the Bangor Daily News, which first reported on the legal action, the MHRC filed its lawsuit in the Kennebec County Superior Court.
According to the Bangor newspaper, which reviewed the filing, the MHRC claims the policies “create a hostile educational environment for gender-nonconforming students in each of their respective public school districts and throughout the state of Maine.”
The suit reportedly requests a judge to rule that the districts are violating state law established under the MHRA and asks the judge to require them to reinstate their pro-transgender policies.
Instead of taking action in response to a complaint, which is how the MHRC typically operates, the organization went straight to court.
“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,” said MHRC executive director Kit Thomson Crossman in a statement.
The lawsuit comes after the MHRC previously said in August that, at that time, the commission had no plans to take action against the district’s decision to rescind its permissive transgender policies.
The MHRC did not target all the districts across the state that have voted to accept the federal Title IX interpretation. For example, MSAD 14’s board in Danforth voted unanimously in September to repeal their “Transgender and Gender Expansive Students” policy and adopt a policy acknowledging only two genders.
It is not clear why the lawsuit did not include all the districts to rescind their transgender policies.
The MHRC lawsuit is likely to make school boards more wary when considering whether to adopt the federal Title IX guidelines.
The Maine Wire reached out to all five school districts targeted in the lawsuit, asking how they intend to respond and whether they are revisiting their policies.
Only RSU 73 School Board Chairwoman Shari Ouellette issued a formal response, saying that the district has no comment at this time.
