Organizers of a campaign to ban transgender athletes from girls sports in Maine said Monday that they have gathered enough signatures to place the issue on the November ballot.
It has been nearly a year since Maine was thrust onto the national stage in the debate over transgender athletes in women's sports after President Donald Trump clashed publicly with Gov. Janet Mills over the issue. In the months that followed, the Democratic-controlled Legislature rejected multiple attempts to pass a statewide ban on transgender athletes in girls' and women's sports, although a handful of school districts have adopted their own policies.
On Monday, leaders of the group Protect Girls Sports in Maine delivered more than 82,000 petition signatures to the secretary of state's office in order to force a statewide vote on the issue. State elections officials will now review the petition sheets to ensure the group has the 67,682 signatures from registered Maine voters to qualify for the ballot.
"It's necessary to put on the ballot because sex-based discrimination is happening right now," said Leyland Streiff, the lead petitioner with the group. "There needs to be a solution for this. Right now it is being solved on a district-by-district level and it shouldn't be. It should be solved on the state level."
Opponents to the proposal are already calling it an "attack on public education" that will increase bullying and harassment in schools.
The initiative would require public schools and entities that govern interscholastic or competitive sports — such as the Maine Principals' Association — to designate teams for males or females or as co-ed. Only athletes who were born female would be able to compete on girls' teams. And schools would be required to maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms and showers for each sex.
Currently, the Maine Principals' Association says it is following the Maine Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity. As a result, a small number of people who were born male but identify as female — just a handful out of tens of thousands of high school athletes statewide — have been allowed to compete on girls' teams in recent years.
The long-simmering issue exploded last February when a state lawmaker posted pictures and the names on social media of a transgender athlete who had won a high school girls' track championship. The post went viral and eventually came to the attention of Trump, who threatened to withhold federal funding from Maine unless the state changed its policy. Mills responded "See you in court" after Trump called her out during a meeting with governors at the White House.
The Trump administration sued Maine under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination. The issue is still tied up in the courts, however.
In an interview, Streiff called his group's proposal "inclusive, fair and safe (because) everybody gets to play sports," although he acknowledged there are strong feelings on both sides of the issue.
"We do not want the Legislature to solve this on our behalf," he said. "They have not acted and the MPA has not acted, so we should leave this up to the voters. The voters of Maine should be able to show up and exercise the Democratic process of going and saying where they stand on this issue."
Hours after Streiff and his supporters delivered their signatures, a coalition led by EqualityMaine, Maine Women's Lobby and GLAD Law attacked the initiative and its ties to a conservative billionaire heavily involved in political campaigns. They pointed to an $800,000 donation from Richard Uihlein — a megadonor to Republican and conservative groups — that largely financed the signature-gathering drive.
In a news release, the coalition said the ballot initiative "proposes a one-size-fits-all approach to sports participation and bathrooms that will increase bullying and harassment and cost local schools millions of dollars for construction and litigation.
“Our coalition is growing, and we will face this challenge head-on and fight every day to pull back the curtains on these billionaires and their efforts to undermine public education in Maine," David Farmer, spokesman for the coalition, said in a statement. "These out-of-state billionaires pay for the campaign, but Maine people pay for the fallout.”
"We welcome anybody to go ahead and be part of our cause and make a donation," Streiff said.
