
The wording of an upcoming ballot initiative attacking transgender people’s rights was just released by Maine’s secretary of state office.
Maine voters in November will vote yes or no on the following question: “Do you want to change civil rights and education laws to require public schools to restrict access to bathrooms and sports based on the gender on the child’s original birth certificate and allow students to sue the schools?”
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Parents demanded that a trans child be banned from sports. The town rejected their request.
Public comment on the wording will be accepted until May 7, and the language will be finalized by May 28.
The Bangor Daily News explains that if the ballot question is approved, schools will be required to label all teams as male, female, or co-ed and restrict participation based on a participant’s sex assigned at birth. Bathroom access in schools will also be restricted. The ballot initiative allows girls to compete on boys’ teams if there is no equivalent girls’ team.
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Maine has been standing up to the presidential administration’s attempts to withhold federal funding for unrelated programs to get states to ban trans students from participating in school sports. The president even called out Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), and she told him that she’d see him in court.
The administration attempted to block U.S. Department of Agriculture funding to punish the state, but a court ordered the administration to disburse the funds that were already allocated by Congress.
“I told him I’d see him in court,” Mills said at the time. “Well, we did see him in court, and we won.”
The Department of Education, though, is investigating a school district in Maine for allowing a transgender girl to participate in the school’s co-ed cheerleading squad as a girl, claiming that recognizing the cheerleader as a girl is a form of discrimination against cis girls. But the state of Maine’s Human Rights Commission is also suing five school districts for not allowing trans kids to participate in school sports as their gender.
While Democratic leaders in the state have stood by transgender people, the state’s Republican leaders have not done so. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was one of the around 82,000 people who signed the petition to put a trans sports ban on the November ballot, her office confirmed to the Bangor Daily News.
Maine is one of four states that will have trans rights restrictions on the ballot in November, along with Nevada, Colorado, and Washington. Maine, Nevada, and Washington voters will vote on whether trans kids can participate in school sports, while Colorado will vote on whether they will have access to health care.
Nevada’s Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo admitted that the “game plan” for the midterm election was to get trans sports participation on the ballot in November to motivate conservatives to go to the polls.
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, former executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, has written that anti-trans sports bans aren’t about protecting women and girls in sports.
“It does nothing to address the real issues facing women and girls in athletics, such as unequal access to funding and facilities, abuse by coaches, physicians, and other trusted adults, and the unconscionable gender pay gap in professional sports,” Heng-Lehtinen wrote, adding that such bans are just part of a larger Republican campaign to “erase transgender people from public life.”
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