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A Maine middle school cheer squad is facing the wrath of the Trump regime for reportedly allowing a trans student to join its co-ed team.
Last week, the Department of Education (ED) descended upon 18 educational institutions, announcing in a press release from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) that they are investigating everything from K-12 school districts, to college sports teams, to state departments that may allow “students to participate in sports based on their ‘gender identity,’ not biological sex.”
Soon after the OCR announcement, the Bangor Daily News reports, Superintendent Michael Hammer of Maine’s Regional School District #19 released a letter firing back at ED. In the case of RSU 19’s Nokomis Regional Middle School in Newport, Maine, ED claimed someone assigned male at birth was allowed to compete on the cheer team and use the women’s locker rooms, as per Hammer.
“The complaint alleges that the District discriminated against female students on the basis of sex by allowing a male student to join the girls’ cheerleading team and use the girls’ bathroom and locker room at Nokomis Regional Middle School,” Hammer wrote. “We were surprised to receive the letter from OCR because we have no record of having received any complaints about our cheerleading program.” He emphasized that the cheer squad is co-ed, non-competitive, and open to any student. Nobody is “cut” from the team.
“[I]t is hard to understand how participation by any student, regardless of their gender or gender identity[,] would discriminate against any other student,” Hammer said. Erin in the Morning was unable to reach a spokesperson for the district for further comment.
Like almost all of the attacks on trans athletes, the press release focused on “safety” in women’s sports—a common and contrived talking point for the right, whose concern for students and women’s athletics seems to evaporate when it comes to issues like addressing the gender wage gap in sports or supporting student survivors of sexual assault.
The Department’s investigations don’t name trans women as the explicit target of the OCR blitz, but that’s mostly because the federal government wants to avoid acknowledging the existence of trans people at all. They use transphobic epithets to get their message across, referring to trans teenage girls as “biological men.”
But RSU 19 and many of the other institutions on the list—such as Santa Monica College in California or Foxborough Public Schools in Massachusetts—are in states with robust equal rights protections for trans people, which would in theory penalize academic institutions for discriminating against their transgender athletes.
In other words, the federal government is investigating schools for allegedly following their state’s laws. There is no federal law requiring schools to ban trans athletes from competing on the team that aligns with their gender.
It’s unclear at this time whether even this is true, and whether there is or ever was a trans student on the cheer squad—cisgender women and intersex people are also common casualties in the right’s war on gender. The anti-trans craze has caused mass harassment campaigns and violence against transgender and cisgender students alike.
Hammer added that RSU 19 does not have a formal policy on gender-based bathroom usage, and that while they will comply with officials conducting the investigation, the district is “confident that when it is completed, it will be determined that our District has not violated any laws.”
Newport, Maine, is a town of just over 3,000 people. It is a distant rural school serving 500 kids from fifth to eighth grade; about half of the students in the district are classified as economically disadvantaged.
Last year, the regime pulled school lunch funding for low-income children in the state over the state’s refusal to comply in advance with anti-trans laws, sparking a lawsuit. The suit was settled in May—federal agencies unfroze the school lunch money, and Maine kept their anti-discrimination laws intact.
CAPTION: A letter sent out by Maine Regional School District 19.
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