(The Center Square) — The Maine Human Rights Commission is suing five school districts that banned transgender students from playing sports and using bathrooms that reflect their gender identity.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday in Kennebec County Superior Court, alleges that the policies — put in place by the school districts in response to President Donald Trump’s threats to withhold federal funding over transgender protections — violate state law and students’ constitutional rights.
“These 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 commission’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.
The plaintiffs claim the school policies violate the Maine Human Rights Act and ask the judge to repeal them, citing a 2014 ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that upheld those provisions of the law.
The lawsuit specifically names five school districts: Maine School Administrative District 70 in Hodgdon; Regional School Unit 24, in Hancock County; RSU 73, in Androscoggin County; the Baileyville School District in Washington County and the Richmond School Department in Sagadahoc County. Representatives from the school districts couldn’t be reached for comment.
Maine has become a focal point in the national debate over transgender athletes in female sports since a confrontation between Gov. Janet Mills and President Trump, who has vowed to withhold federal funding from any states that fail to comply with his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order. Mills, a Democrat, has refused to comply with Trump’s directive.
The state is facing a lawsuit from the Education Department’s civil rights division that faults Maine’s DOE policy allowing transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports, claiming it violates Title IX, a 1972 law that forbids discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also frozen funding to the state over the issue, and a referral has been made to the Department of Justice over ongoing trans participation in girls’ sports in the state. The state is challenging the funding withdrawal in court.
Meanwhile, conservative groups have been gathering signatures to put a question on the 2026 Maine ballot that would ban trans students from participating in girls’ sports teams.
