While Texas Republicans were busy choosing rabidly anti-transgender Attorney General Ken Paxton as their nominee for the U.S. Senate in the Tuesday, March 26 primary, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was busy banning an anti-trans ballot effort from her state’s ballot in the November general election.
ErinInTheMorning.com reports that the ballot initiative, bankrolled by anti-trans billionaire Richard Uihlein and promoted by the group “Protect Girls Sports in Maine,” would prohibit transgender students from participating in school sports and from using gender-appropriate bathrooms at school. But the reader-supported publication noted, the initiative “would have done far more than what its sports-focused branding suggested.”
It would have, Erin In The Morning reported, “defined a person’s sex for school purposes as ‘a person’s biological status as male or female recorded at birth on the person’s original birth certificate’ — a definition that would have stripped transgender students of legal recognition in Maine schools. It would have required public schools to ‘maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms, shower rooms, and other private spaces for each sex,’ extending the ban well beyond athletics and into every gendered space in a school building. It would have created a private right of action allowing any student to sue their school for ‘direct injury’ suffered from a violation of the act, effectively turning every transgender student’s presence in a bathroom or on a sports team into potential litigation. And it would have specifically carved transgender students out of the Maine Human Rights Act.”
ErinInTheMorning explained that Bellows’ ruling this week came after a court remand, an evidentiary hearing and a sworn-testimony review of the petitions to get the initiative on the ballot ended up striking as invalid more than 12,500 of the 67,682 petition signatures supporters had submitted, leaving the initiative more than 500 signatures short of the number necessary to get it on the ballot.
ErinInTheMorning also pointed out that the ballot initiative was instituted after Maine Gov. Janet Mills “fiercely rejected Trump administration attempts to strongarm the state into enacting such restrictions on its own, under threat of losing school lunch money and more.”
— Tammye Nash