Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday announced a civil lawsuit against Maine’s Department of Education for violating Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination that the Trump administration has said prohibits transgender students from participating in girls’ and women’s sports in schools.
“We have exhausted every other remedy,” Bondi said Tuesday morning at a news conference in Washington. “We don’t like standing up here and filing lawsuits.”
Joining her was Maine Rep. Laurel Libby (R), whose viral Facebook post about a transgender high school student attracted national media attention and led the Democrat-led state House to censure her, and conservative activist and former college swimmer Riley Gaines, who frequently campaigns against the inclusion of trans athletes in women’s sports.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, also present at Tuesday’s news conference, said Maine has continued to “willfully” violate Title IX by allowing transgender girls to compete against and alongside non-transgender girls against the administration’s orders.
In recent weeks, Maine, one of the nation’s geographically smallest and least populous states, has found itself at the center of the nation’s debate over transgender rights.
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills clashed with President Trump over the state’s refusal to comply with his executive order to ban trans athletes from competing on girls and women’s teams in February, spurring a cascade of federal investigations into the state that Mills has called “politically driven.”
“See you in court,” Mills told Trump at a National Governors Association session at the White House that month after Trump threatened the state’s federal funding.
Mills and other state officials, including the attorney general, have said implementing Trump’s order would violate the Maine Human Rights Act, which explicitly protects the rights of transgender students to participate on sports teams that match their gender identity.
“Governor Mills will definitely get her wish,” McMahon said Tuesday.
The Education Department referred its Title IX investigation into Maine’s state education department to the Justice Department on Friday after the state failed to resolve with the agency over its findings that Maine violated Title IX.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which recently began investigating schools and states that allow transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports, said in March that it had also found Maine to have violated Title IX. The U.S. Department of Agriculture froze some of the state’s funding this month over a similar finding, which Maine disputed in a lawsuit.
Bondi on Tuesday said the Justice Department will seek an injunction to prevent Maine from allowing transgender athletes to continue participating in girls’ and women’s sports. Only two openly transgender athletes, both in high school, are competing in Maine.
“I don’t care if it’s one. I don’t care if it’s two. I don’t care if it’s 100 — it’s going to stop, and it’s going to stop in every single state,” Bondi said.
She added that the DOJ would also seek to have athletic titles won by transgender students in Maine revoked and “returned” to the second-place finishers, whom Bondi said were the rightful winners. The department is also considering whether to retroactively pull funding received by Maine “for not complying in the past.”
It was not immediately clear to which time frame Bondi was referring.
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