Feds to probe Minnesota State High School League over transgender athlete policy
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The Trump administration on Wednesday said it will investigate the Minnesota State High School League’s intention to let state students continue to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity.
That league policy has been in place for a decade. League officials last week signaled it would stay in place following President Donald Trump’s executive order effectively barring transgender athletes from female sports but noted they would “continue to review the existing state laws alongside the new Presidential Executive Order.”
Earlier this week, the high school league said it would ask state Attorney General Keith Ellison for a formal opinion on the matter and keep its policy unchanged during the 60-day compliance period allowed under the executive order.
High school league officials have said that the Minnesota Human Rights Act and Equal Protection Clause of the Minnesota Constitution prohibit discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
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Following months of review, the high school league board in December 2014 voted 18-1 to let transgender athletes play on the sports teams that best align with their gender identity. The league is a nonprofit voluntary association that governs interscholastic sports and other activities at high schools in Minnesota.
While the initial policy was controversial, supporters say it’s operated quietly and successfully over the decade.
“Minnesota shows us very clearly that inclusion of trans people in sports is not a threat to cisgender girls' participation in sports,” Minnesota House Rep. Leigh Finke, the first openly transgender person in the Legislature, told MPR News last week.
Finke, DFL-St. Paul, noted that the high school league’s policy over the past decade hasn’t slowed the growth in girls sports. ”What we really have is a manufactured crisis,” Finke added. “We do not have a high population of trans girls specifically who play sports.”
On Wednesday, however, the federal Education Department said it needed to investigate high school leagues in Minnesota and California “to ensure that female athletes in these states are treated with the dignity, respect, and equality that the Trump Administration demands.”
In the statement, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, dismissed the high school’s league’s intention to follow Minnesota law and constitution as “meaningless virtue-signaling.”
Trainor added that “history does not look kindly on entities and states that actively opposed the enforcement of federal civil rights laws that protect women and girls from discrimination and harassment.”
A spokesperson for the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office said Ellison will review the league request, adding that Ellison “has made it clear that he opposes efforts by the federal government to discriminate against, harass, and bully transgender Minnesotans.”
In the statement, the spokesperson noted Ellison has already filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of a Trump executive order that seeks to ban gender-affirming care.