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Transgender Athletes Face a Showdown with Trump

6 min readFeb 27, 2025

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Democrat Senator Birch Bayh exercises with Title IX athletes at Purdue University in the 1970s. Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Last Friday, President Donald Trump had a testy exchange with Maine Democratic Governor Janet Mills. They were at a bipartisan event that was part of the National Governors Association’s winter summit.

“I’ll see you in court,” Mills said, following the hostile back and forth over the rights of transgender women to compete in women’s sports.

The conversation, if you could call it that, was a response to Trump’s threat to eliminate Maine’s federal funding if the state refuses to comply with one of his executive orders.

The order that precipitated the tense encounter is called the “No Men in Women’s Sports Executive order,” and it does exactly what it says; bans transgender women from women’s sports.

This giant swing of the pendulum away from Transgender rights is something Trump promised in his campaign, to counter the other giant pendulum swing that President Joe Biden initiated. Both Presidents ventured far from what centrists would consider middle ground on this much-disputed issue.

President Biden re-wrote Title IX, which originally stated that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from…

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The Partnered Pen

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Bebe Nicholson
Bebe Nicholson

Written by Bebe Nicholson

Writer, editor, publisher, journalist, author, columnist, former nonprofit director. bknicholson@att.net

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