Maine Adopts Transgender Policy in Sports News First

AUGUSTA, Maine (curated by Sports News First, from Bangor Daily News) — Dick Durost was attending a national conference a few years ago when the idea of developing a policy to facilitate transgender high school students participating in interscholastic sports came to the forefront.

 By March 2013, Maine was one of a handful of states across the country with a transgender participation policy after its approval by the the general membership of the Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees interscholastic sports in the state.

“At that time, Colorado was in the process of putting together a policy and several New England states, including Connecticut and Vermont and us, started to have the conversation about getting in front of this issue,” said Durost, the Maine Principals’ Association’s executive director.

“We felt it just made good sense to put good policy in place without the emotion that would go with having a particular student be the one coming forward and requesting to do this,” he said.

Momentum for such policies has continued to grow during the last two years, with the Minnesota State High School League’s vote in March to open up girls sports to transgender student-athletes marking the 33rd state to adopt a transgender student participation policy. Minnesota law already had permitted girls to compete in boys sports.

“Certainly it’s been a rather common topic at [National Federation of State High School Association] meetings,” said Durost, “and I think we’ve tried to give the same advice to other states.

“That was to hopefully get in front of this before you had a court case or those kinds of things so you could adopt policy for policy’s sake. I think as a result that’s the approach most states have taken,” he said.

Maine Principals’ Association attorney Meg LePage, a partner with Pierce Atwood in Portland, studied the few state high school policies that existed at the time as well as the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s policy and other related literature in helping to develop Maine’s transgender student-athlete plan.

“We created a presumption that a transgender student would be able to participate on the team that the student identified with,” she said, “but also a process that would ensure that the policy couldn’t be misused to gain some sort of athletic advantage, so there is a requirement that the student make an application and go to a confidential meeting where they demonstrate that this is a bona fide request and not something that is being easily manipulated.”...More