Trump’s executive order to recognize only two genders, male and female, will not affect the state’s law and school board policies, according to a statement issued late last week by Maine’s Department of Education.
Protections in the Maine Human Rights Act require that “all students must be allowed to participate in ‘all educational, counseling and vocational guidance programs, all apprenticeship and on-the-job training programs and all extracurricular activities without discrimination because of sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, a physical or mental disability, ancestry, national origin, race, color or religion,'” as noted in a Boston.com report.
Reports Boston.com:
“The MHRA also prohibits retaliation for asserting MHRA-protected rights,” the announcement said.
The anti-trans executive order will have a particular impact on young people, said Tesla Cariani, a lecturer in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Boston University.
“Youth have limited legal rights to begin with, which is one reason why the executive order banning gender-affirming care is targeted towards people under 19,” Cariani said, who added that the executive order and the ones that have come since — including one that bans transgender troops from serving openly in the military, and another that aims to end gender-affirming medical treatments for those under 19 years old — are “already negatively impacting the mental and physical health of students.”
“The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system,” the gender order reads. “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
“These are attempts to legislate and define trans people out of existence,” Cariani said. “But trans and gender variant people, including trans youth, have existed long before these orders and will continue to persist.”
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has not released an announcement of this kind, and its communications director Jacqueline Reis declined to say whether the agency is expected to.
But, she noted, Massachusetts has a similar state law that “specifically protects students on the basis of their gender identity on the basis of their gender identity,” Reis said.
The law asserts that “No person shall be excluded from or discriminated against in admission to a public school of any town, or in obtaining the advantages, privileges and courses of study of such public school on account of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin or sexual orientation.”
And DESE has its own definition of gender identity, Reis noted. It describes it as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”
Read the complete Boston.com story here.
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