AUGUSTA, Maine, February 5, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) - The governor of Maine, Paul LePage, has stopped his administration from promulgating new rules that would punish schools that do not allow transgender students to use the restrooms, showers, and other accommodations of the opposite biological sex. The Maine Human Rights Commission (MHRC) and the Department of Education had drawn up binding regulations mandating the state's schools to allow transgender students to use the facilities and play on the sports teams of their chosen sex.
The January 13 memo signed by MHRC counsel Barbara Archer Hirsch requires that all school officials, and fellow students, call the transgender student by his or her preferred name and pronoun, as well.
State officials said they were responding to a January 2014 ruling from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in favor of a transgender teenage male who sued to use the girls' restroom. The high profile legal case dragged through the court system for five years, until the court ordered the Orono School District to pay $75,000 to the male, who legally changed his name to Nicole Maines. The teen, who was born Wyatt, has an identical twin brother named Jonas.
At the heart of the case was the Maine Human Rights Act, which the legistlature revised in 2005 to include gender identity as a protected victim class, alongside race and biological sex. State officials presented a new set of administrative rules last October, although the statute in question had not been changed.
But the Republican governor's spokeswoman, Adrienne Bennett, said the ruling requires the legislature, not an unelected bureaucratic board, to bring the law into accordance with the court ruling.
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