OPINION:
“We’ll see you in court,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills told President Trump at a Feb. 21 gathering of the National Governors Association at the White House.
Ms. Mills, a Democrat, should be careful what she wishes for because Mr. Trump wasn’t bluffing when he said Ms. Mills and Maine would be the big losers if she refused to comply with his Feb. 5 executive order conditioning receipt of federal education dollars on prohibiting transgender faux females from invading girls’ and women’s interscholastic athletics.
Mr. Trump disputed Ms. Mills’ assertion that she was “complying with state and federal law” and reminded her that his office represented that federal law.
“Good. I’ll see you in court,” Mr. Trump retorted. “I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.”
It was not an idle threat. Within hours of the White House event, Mr. Trump ordered the Department of Education to determine whether Ms. Mills and Maine were in violation of Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination at any school or any other education program, including in athletics, that receives federal funding.
Just days before the Trump-Mills confrontation and the ensuing Education Department probe, an interscholastic athletic competition in Maine showed this fight is not over hypotheticals or what could happen but over what is, in fact, happening — and not just in Maine but also across the country, albeit mostly in blue states.
On Feb. 17, a boy from Cumberland, Maine, who “identifies” as a “girl” won the girls’ high school Class B state championship pole-vaulting competition. His jump of 10 feet, 6 inches was 8 inches higher than the female runner-up. Last year, competing against other boys, he finished fifth.
That was just days after a phalanx of female athletes joined Mr. Trump as he signed his campaign-promised No Men in Women’s Sports executive order at the White House.
Unmoved by parental and Republican state lawmakers’ protestations of the inherent unfairness of the pole-vaulting competition or by the risk of losing $250 million in federal funding, a defiant Ms. Mills released a statement Feb. 21 vowing not to follow Mr. Trump’s order, asserting, “The state of Maine will not be intimidated by the president’s threats.”
The Trump vs. Mills bout is shaping to be akin to a fight pitting Mike Tyson against Dylan Mulvaney.
“If the president attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of federal funding, my administration and the attorney general will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” Ms. Mills fumed.
That’s just it, however. It wouldn’t be unilateral.
Ms. Mills will have brought it upon herself and her state by putting the interests of an estimated 0.003 of 1% of the population that “identifies” as transgender ahead of 51% of the population, namely, real girls and women (of whom Ms. Mills reportedly is one).
Ms. Mills, 77, had no children, but perhaps if the granddaughter of a close friend or relative lost an athletic medal, trophy or scholarship to one of these faux females, she might be a bit more empathetic to those who have.
There are, in fact, many girls and women athletes who have lost out to these transgender interlopers. The website SheWon.org meticulously tracks such things, and according to its current tally, 778 female athletes have been deprived of 1,104 awards in 536 competitions across 41 sports.
As such, it can’t be blithely dismissed as a rare, isolated phenomenon.
Does Ms. Mills want to spend her political capital — to say nothing of Maine taxpayers’ dollars and state Attorney General Aaron Frey’s time — fighting on an issue she is going against the sentiment of nearly 80% of the population?
A New York Times/Ipsos survey released in January found the vast majority of Americans, including fully two-thirds of Democrats, don’t think these make-believe females should be allowed to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
“Thinking about transgender female athletes — meaning athletes who were male at birth, but who currently identify as female — do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports?” the survey asked.
Of the 2,128 respondents, 79% said biological males who identify as girls or women should not be allowed to take part in female athletics.
Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democratic, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete against XX-chromosome girls and women.
In Maine, where I spent the first 30 years of my life, there is no lieutenant governor, and the attorney general is not elected but instead is selected by a majority vote of the Legislature. As such, Mr. Frey, a former Democratic state lawmaker, would ordinarily be the heir apparent to the term-limited Ms. Mills, a former state attorney general whose second term as governor ends in January 2027.
If Mr. Frey aspires to succeed Ms. Mills and run for governor, he should think twice — or thrice — before taking on this quixotic, viscerally unpopular losing battle.
Is this the political hill that Ms. Mills, Mr. Frey and other Democrats want to die on?
Have Democrats learned nothing from Kamala Harris’ presidential loss in November, which was due in no small part to Mr. Trump’s barrage of attack ads exposing her support for federal taxpayer funding of sex-change operations, even for federal prisoners — a stance she was unwilling or unable to disavow?
Apart from being a blatant violation of Title IX, how is allowing delusional boys and men to compete against real females not a real “war on women” — unlike the one Democrats have for decades falsely accused Republicans of waging?
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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