Education Department demands Maine exclude trans girls from sports or face loss of all K-12 funding

"OCR's final warning to Maine, issued March 31, 2025, gave the state until April 11 to sign a compliance agreement or face a DOJ referral for civil enforcement and termination of all federal K-12 education funding. The warning followed a noncompliance finding OCR issued on March 19, after Maine refused to sign a proposed Resolution Agreement within the 10-day window OCR offered. Acting Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor said the deadline was final, noting that under prior administrations, "enforcement was an illusory proposition. No more."\n\nOn April 11, the Department of Education followed through. It referred the case to DOJ and initiated proceedings to terminate Maine's federal K-12 education funding. Maine did not sign."

"The Resolution Agreement OCR drafted for Maine was five pages of specific demands that went well beyond requiring a policy change. Maine would have had to sign a statement admitting it "engaged in wrongful or illegal activity in violation of Title IX in allowing the participation of male athletes in female-only high school sports in the state." The agreement required Maine to issue a directive to all public school districts defining "female" as a person with "a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs" and "male" as a person with "a reproductive system with the biological function of producing sperm." Schools would have been required to adopt those biological definitions as the operative meaning of "woman" and "man."\n\nThe agreement also required Maine to strip athletic titles from any transgender girl who had ever placed in a Maine girls' sports competition and give those titles to the cisgender girl who finished behind her, along with a written apology letter to each affected athlete "for allowing her educational experience and participation in school sports to be marred by sex discrimination." Maine was also required to mandate staff training on OCR's interpretation of Title IX. Maine got 10 days to consider the agreement. OCR's own internal manual specifies that entities should normally receive 90 days."

"Maine received $183.2 million from the U.S. Department of Education in fiscal year 2024, flowing through Title I grants for low-income schools, IDEA special education funding, and other formula programs with no connection to the athletic policy at the center of the dispute. A funding termination would cut off services to students who had nothing to do with the Greely High School track meet.\n\nOn April 2, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins separately froze approximately $5.7 million in Child Nutrition Program funds — money Maine used to feed children in schools, childcare centers, and after-school programs. A federal court later found the freeze violated due process because the programs frozen had no connection to the Title IX dispute."

"The investigation was not triggered by a formal complaint to OCR. On February 17, 2025, Maine State Representative Laurel Libby, a Republican from Auburn, posted on her Facebook page naming and publishing photographs of a specific transgender student at Greely High School, a student who had just won the Maine girls' Class B indoor track and field state championship in pole vault. Libby's post stated that the same student had competed in boys' pole vault the previous year and finished fifth, then switched to the girls' competition and won first place, helping the Greely girls' team win the team state championship by a single point. The Maine House Speaker and other officials moved to censure Libby for publicly identifying a minor. Libby sued in federal court to challenge the censure, arguing it violated her First Amendment rights.\n\nFour days later, on February 21, 2025, President Trump singled out Maine at a White House meeting of state governors and demanded that Governor Janet Mills comply with his February 5 executive order directing federal agencies to enforce Title IX consistent with a biological-sex definition. That same day, three separate federal agencies simultaneously launched investigations into Maine. The Department of Education's OCR opened a Title IX probe into the Maine Department of Education and Maine School Administrative District 51, which oversees Greely High School. HHS's OCR initiated a Title IX compliance review of the Maine Department of Education and the University of Maine System. The USDA initiated a compliance review of the University of Maine. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Governor Mills a formal warning letter four days later, on February 25."

"The HHS investigation into the Maine Department of Education concluded in four days: opened February 21, violation finding issued February 25, 2025. HHS contacted no one at the Maine DOE or the governor's office before issuing its finding. Neither HHS nor the Department of Education's OCR requested any data, documents, or interviews from Maine before concluding the state had violated Title IX. Typical OCR investigations take months and involve evidence gathering before any finding.\n\nOn March 5, HHS expanded its investigation to include the Maine Principals' Association and Greely High School. On March 17, HHS issued a formal violation finding against all three entities and gave them 10 days to sign compliance agreements or face DOJ referral. By the time the Department of Education issued its own final warning on March 31, HHS had already referred its Maine case to DOJ."

"On February 21, 2025, at the White House meeting of governors, Trump told the assembled governors that Maine would lose all federal funding unless it complied with his executive order on transgender athletes. Governor Janet Mills, sitting in the room, told him directly, "We're going to follow the law, sir. We'll see you in court." Trump echoed it back. Multiple reporters present and Maine officials confirmed the exchange.\n\nMills had maintained since the executive order's January 2025 issuance that Maine's policy under the Maine Human Rights Act was consistent with federal law. She held that position through the April 11 deadline, publicly backed AG Frey's legal strategy, and showed no sign of directing state agencies to sign the compliance agreement. After settling the USDA lawsuit, she told reporters at a May 2025 news conference, "It's good to feel a victory like this.""

"Maine DOE Commissioner Pender Makin refused to sign OCR's Resolution Agreement, saying it would require the department to violate Maine's Human Rights Act, which explicitly prohibits discrimination based on gender identity in schools. The Maine Principals' Association also refused to sign a compliance agreement with HHS. The MPA's policy allows transgender students to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity statewide — which is why OCR's findings triggered demands for statewide policy changes, not just school-specific remedies.\n\nThe MPA did respond to document requests. District attorney Melissa Hewey described receiving dozens of requests from OCR in less than two weeks — rosters for every girls' sports team, names of transgender athletes, equipment access comparisons. Maine's assistant attorney general Sarah Forster wrote to OCR's regional director on April 11, 2025, stating, "Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls' and women's sports teams. Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds.""

"Attorney General Aaron Frey led Maine's legal defense across multiple simultaneous fronts. His office argued in every forum that Title IX does not prohibit transgender girls from competing on girls' teams and that the Trump administration's interpretation is itself unlawful. When USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins froze Child Nutrition Program funds on April 2, 2025, funds the state had counted on to feed children in schools, childcare centers, and after-school programs, Frey filed suit against the USDA in federal court on April 7, 2025. In the complaint, Frey's office described Rollins' threatening letter to Mills as "sounding more like a hostage taker seeking a ransom payment than a cabinet-level federal official."\n\nFrey won a temporary restraining order from federal Judge Woodcock on April 11, blocking the USDA freeze. The court ruled not on the transgender athlete question but on procedural grounds: USDA had failed to follow the legally required process before withholding funds. On May 2, 2025, Frey and Mills announced a settlement in which USDA agreed not to freeze, terminate, or otherwise interfere with Maine's federal funds based on the alleged Title IX violations without following all legally required procedures. The Education Department's separate case, arising from the April 11 DOJ referral, remained pending, and Frey's office expected to contest it on both procedural and substantive grounds."

"Title IX was enacted in 1972 as part of the Education Amendments and prohibits discrimination "on the basis of sex" in any educational program receiving federal financial assistance. The statute's text does not define "sex." For the first five decades after its passage, the term was applied primarily to prohibit schools from excluding girls from sports, limiting female enrollment, and paying male and female coaches differently. The Biden administration issued a 2024 final rule, effective August 1, 2024, extending Title IX's protections to transgender students in school programs. A federal district court in Kentucky vacated that rule on January 9, 2025, before Trump took office. Trump's executive order on January 20, his first day in office, rescinded it as well, directing agencies to return to pre-Biden regulatory interpretations.\n\nThe Trump administration's executive order "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" directed every federal department to review education grants and rescind funding to programs that fail to comply, framing the policy as protecting women "as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth." The executive order did not amend or repeal Title IX, which is a statute passed by Congress and cannot be changed by executive order. It directed agencies to interpret "sex" in Title IX to mean biological sex as determined at birth. Maine's lawyers argued at every stage that this executive directive alone cannot override the statute as courts have interpreted it."

"The Supreme Court has not issued a ruling directly settling what Title IX means for transgender girls in school sports. The most relevant precedent is Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which the Court held 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination "because of sex," covers discrimination against transgender employees. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, reasoning that it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being transgender without taking their sex into account, making such discrimination a form of sex discrimination. Maine and the states defending inclusive athletic policies argue that Bostock's textual reasoning applies with equal force to Title IX's parallel "on the basis of sex" language.\n\nThe Trump administration argued that Bostock was limited to the employment context of Title VII and does not govern Title IX's application to athletic competition, which raises different considerations about physical differences between male and female competitors. Multiple federal circuits are currently divided on the question in related cases. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, stated publicly after the final warning was issued that she believes Title IX "mandated equal access to athletic resources and facilities on the basis of sex — not on the basis of gender identity" and that transgender athletes should not compete in girls' and women's athletics. She also said she would advocate for Maine to receive its fair share of federal funding, treating the funding threat and the policy question as separate matters."

"Maine was the first state to reach the final stage of the Trump administration's Title IX enforcement process. On June 10, 2025, the Department of Education announced 18 simultaneous investigations against other states — California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington — using the same template: directed investigation, rapid noncompliance finding, short compliance window, enforcement referral.\n\nFormer OCR attorney Jackie Wernz said of the Maine case, "I think we are going to see more of exactly what we're seeing with Maine — a directed investigation, a finding of noncompliance, a short window to agree to change the policy or practice, followed by enforcement, probably to DOJ." On April 22, 2025, Minnesota filed a preemptive lawsuit after AG Bondi named it as the next enforcement target. The Maine case set the procedural and legal framework for every state challenge that followed."