Maine’s Governor Picks Fight She Won’t Win With Trump Over Trans Athletes Invading Women’s Sports

“We’ll see you in court,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills told President Donald Trump at a Feb. 21 gathering of the National Governors Association at the White House.

But Mills, a Democrat, should be careful what she wishes for, because Trump wasn’t bluffing when he said Mills and Maine would be the big losers if she refused to comply with his Feb. 5 executive order conditioning receipt of federal education dollars on prohibiting transgender faux females from invading girls and women’s interscholastic athletics.

Trump disputed Mills’ assertion that she is “complying with state and federal law” and reminded her that his office represented that federal law.

“Good. I’ll see you in court,” Trump retorted. “I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.”

It was not an idle threat. Within hours of the White House event, Trump ordered his Department of Education to determine whether Mills and Maine were in violation of Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination at any school or any other education program, including in athletics, that receives federal funding.

The Trump-Mills confrontation and the ensuing Education Department probe came just days after an interscholastic athletic competition in Maine that showed this fight is not over hypotheticals—or what could happen, but over what is in fact happening—and not just in Maine, but across the country, albeit mostly in blue states.

Just four days earlier, on Feb. 17, a boy from Cumberland, Maine, who “identifies” as a “girl” won the girls’ high school Class B state championship pole-vaulting competition. His jump of 10-feet-6-inches was eight inches higher than the female runner-up. (Last year, competing against other boys, he finished fifth.)

That was just two days after Feb. 5, when Trump was joined by a phalanx of female athletes as he signed his campaign-promised “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order at the White House.

Unmoved by parental and Republican state lawmakers’ protestations of the inherent unfairness of the pole-vaulting competition, or by the risk of losing $250 million in federal funding, a defiant Mills released a statement on Feb. 21 vowing not to follow Trump’s order, asserting, “The state of Maine will not be intimidated by the president’s threats.”

But the Trump vs. Mills bout is shaping up to be akin to a fight pitting Mike Tyson against Dylan Mulvaney.

“If the president attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine schoolchildren of the benefit of federal funding, my administration and the attorney general will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” Mills fumed.

That’s just it, however. It wouldn’t be unilateral.

Mills will have brought it upon herself and her state by putting the interests of an estimated .003 of 1% of the population that “identifies” as transgender ahead of 51% of the population; namely, real girls and women (of whom Mills reportedly is one).

Mills, 77, had no children, but perhaps if the granddaughter of a close friend or relative lost an athletic medal, trophy, or scholarship to one of these faux females, she might be a bit more empathetic to those who have.

There are in fact many girls and women athletes who indeed have lost out to these transgender interlopers. The website SheWon.org meticulously tracks such things, and according to its current tally, 791 female athletes have been deprived of 1,121 awards in 545 competitions across 43 different sports.

As such, it can’t be blithely dismissed as a rare, isolated phenomenon.

Does Mills really want to spend her political capital—to say nothing of Maine taxpayers’ dollars and state Attorney General Aaron Frey’s time—fighting on an issue on which she is going against the sentiment of nearly 80% of the population?

A New York Times/Ipsos survey released in January found the vast majority of Americans—including fully two-thirds of Democrats, even—don’t think these make-believe females should be allowed to compete in girls and women’s sports.

“Thinking about transgender female athletes—meaning athletes who were male at birth, but who currently identify as female—do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports?” the NYT-Ipsos survey asked.

Of the 2,128 respondents, 79% said biological males who identify as girls or women should not be allowed to take part in female athletics.

Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democrat, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete against XX-chromosomed girls and women.

In Maine, where I lived for 30 years, there is no lieutenant governor, and the attorney general is not elected, but instead is selected by a majority vote of the Legislature. As such, Frey, a former Democratic state lawmaker himself, would ordinarily be the heir apparent to the term-limited Mills, a former state attorney general whose second term as governor ends in January 2027.

But if Frey aspires to succeed Mills and run for governor next year, he should think twice—or three times—before taking on this quixotic and viscerally unpopular losing battle.

Is this really the political hill that Mills, Frey, and other Democrats want to die on?

Have Democrats learned nothing from Kamala Harris’ presidential loss in November, which was due in no small part to Trump’s barrage of attack ads exposing her support for federal taxpayer funding of sex-change operations, even for federal prisoners—a stance she was unwilling or unable to disavow?

Apart from being a blatant violation of Title IX, how is allowing delusional boys and men to compete against real females not a real “war on women”—unlike the phony one Democrats have for decades falsely accused Republicans of waging?

Originally published by The Washington Times

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