The enforcement arm of President Donald Trump’s Department of Education announced it is rooting out transgender student-athletes reported in Minnesota and California.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said “directed investigations” into the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) would commence after the two sports associations announced they would adhere to state antidiscrimination rules allowing transgender student-athletes to play school sports.

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Craig Trainor, the department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, said that would be in violation of Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”

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“The Minnesota State High School League and the California Interscholastic Federation are free to engage in all the meaningless virtue-signaling that they want, but at the end of the day they must abide by federal law,” Trainor said in a press release, using the same partisan and threatening language now regularly employed by agency officials in the Trump era.

“OCR’s Chicago and San Francisco regional offices will conduct directed investigations into both organizations to ensure that female athletes in these states are treated with the dignity, respect, and equality that the Trump Administration demands,” Trainor said. “I would remind these organizations that history does not look kindly on entities and states that actively opposed the enforcement of federal civil rights laws that protect women and girls from discrimination and harassment.”  

“This includes the possibility of allowing male athletes to compete in women’s sports and use women’s intimate facilities,” the press release added.

In his language about “history,” “enforcement,” and “federal civil rights laws,” Trainor may be alluding to actions taken by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the Civil Rights era to forcibly integrate schools in the South. Whether or not calling up the National Guard to protect “women’s intimate facilities” is an administration priority was unclear.

Trump’s Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports order states, “It is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities” and to take “all appropriate action to affirmatively protect all-female athletic opportunities and all-female locker rooms and thereby provide the equal opportunity guaranteed by Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972.” 

The first legal challenge to the order came this week when two trans student-athletes in New Hampshire added it to an existing lawsuit challenging that state’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which requires students to compete based on sex at birth. A federal judge temporarily blocked the law in August as the lawsuit proceeds.

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia allow trans student-athletes to compete. Twenty-seven states have laws or regulations requiring students to participate based on sex at birth.

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