Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills clashed with President Donald Trump at a White House event Friday over her state’s opposition to his executive order seeking to bar transgender student athletes from playing on girls’ sports teams.
While the president was addressing a bipartisan group of governors, he stopped to single out Mills. “Is Maine here?” Trump asked, “the governor of Maine?” “Yeah,” she responded from across the room. “I’m here.”
Trump had been rambling about “men playing in women’s sports” and inaccurately retelling the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who received anti-trans hate for competing in the women’s cohort at the Paris Olympics, even though she herself is not transgender or intersex.
“Are you not going to comply with it,” Trump asked Mills, referring to his executive order. “I’m complying with the state and federal laws,” she responded quickly. “Well I am, we are the federal law,” Trump said before threatening to withhold Maine’s federal funding if Mills and other leaders in her state did not comply.
In early February, the Maine Principals’ Association, the body that governs school sports in the state, announced it would continue to allow transgender female athletes to compete, saying that Trump’s executive order conflicts with the Maine Human Rights Act.
“See you in court,” Mills told Trump in a rare act of public defiance to the president’s face by Democratic lawmakers. “Good, I’ll see you in court,” he responded. “I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”
While brief, the exchange has garnered national attention as the Democratic Party tries to figure out how to respond to the Trump administration’s persistent upending of long-held federal standards.
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Trump’s executive order, which notes several times in the text that it will “protect” women, used Title IX to justify excluding transgender athletes from playing on the sports team that matches their gender identity (though transgender boys and men are notably absent from the language). This is a much different interpretation from former president Joe Biden’s administration. In 2024, Biden finalized new Title IX rules barring schools from discriminating against transgender students.
According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association President Charlie Baker, who testified in front of a Senate panel in December, there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes that he is aware of who currently compete in college sports and, nationally, just around 1 percent of adults identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law—a reality that highlights the outsized fixation from the Trump administration.
