Maine girls track star calls Laurel Libby a 'hateful' bully

A freshman high school track star is pushing back against state Rep. Laurel Libby’s campaign against transgender athletes.

In a letter published by the Portland Press Herald, Anelise Feldman, who attends Yarmouth High School, defended Soren Stark-Chessa, a transgender athlete who recently took first place in both the 1600- and 800-meter events.

Feldman placed second in the 1600, clocking a personal best of 6:16.32, she wrote. It was enough to earn her varsity status at Yarmouth High. Stark-Chessa finished 5:57.27 in the 1600 and 2:43.31 in the 800, just a second ahead of her next closest competitor.

“The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points,” Feldman wrote in the letter to the editor.

Stark-Chessa, a junior at Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport, testified last week before a legislative committee hearing a slate of bills concerning transgender athletes.

In an interview on Fox News last week, Libby lamented Stark-Chessa’s performance at the track meet earlier this month, accusing her of “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium.”

But Feldman pushed back against Libby, saying that personal improvement is valued as much as the place where athletes finish. She wrote that athletics are the highlight of many students’ time in high school.

“No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are,” Feldman wrote in the Press Herald letter.

In February, Libby took to social media to lament the performance of a different transgender athlete who had won a girls indoor track title. That post thrust Maine into the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who threatened to withhold federal funding from the state over the inclusion of transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports, saying that violates an executive order he signed that month.

The day after Trump singled out Maine at a Republican governors’ event in Washington, he crossed paths with Gov. Janet Mills at an event at the White House. In a heated exchange, Trump pressed Mills on the state’s policy toward transgender athletes and the governor told the president that she would “see you in court.”

State law, specifically the Maine Human Rights Act, prohibits discrimination in education, employment, housing and more on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, ancestry or national origin.

There are no transgender athletes competing on any University of Maine System sports team. At the high school level, only two transgender athletes are competing during the current school year.

For the 2023-2024 school year, about 45,000 students participated in high school sports in Maine, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. (That does count students who participated in two or more sports multiple times.)

Between 2013 and 2021, the Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees scholastic sports for 151 public and private schools, heard from 56 trans students wishing to participate on a high school sports team consistent with their gender identity, only four of whom were trans girls.

Since that verbal sparring at the White House, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented pressure campaign against Maine over the inclusion of transgender athletes. Key to that has been a slate of Title IX investigations from six federal agencies targeting the state, the Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals’ Association, Greely High School in Cumberland and the UMaine System.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued the state alleging it was discriminating against and failing to protect women and girls in violation of Title IX, a landmark 1972 anti-discrimination statute. Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey responded late last week, accusing the Trump administration of a slew of constitutional violations and asking a federal judge to toss out the case.

That case could ultimately land before the conservative U.S. Supreme Court, where the Trump administration could ask it to rule that Title IX outlaws athletic policies like the ones in Maine and more than 20 other states.

The U.S. Department of Education, whose Title IX probe is behind the civil rights lawsuit, has launched a separate probe into its state counterpart over allegations that dozens of school districts are hiding students’ “gender plans” from parents in violation of the   Family Educational Privacy Rights Act.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also has referred a Title IX case to the Justice Department.

The Maine House censured Libby in February for her social media posts. She has sued House Speaker Ryan Fecteau in federal court to get her speaking and voting privileges back. But the courts have handed her two  setbacks.

Now she’s asking the Supreme Court to take up her case.

Beyond the investigations, the Trump administration has been trying to leverage federal funds to get the state to reverse its policies toward transgender athletes.

Almost immediately the Trump administration pulled funding for Maine Sea Grant. More than 30 states, Puerto Rico and Guam participate in the national Sea Grant program. No other Sea Grant program has seen its funding cut.

That funding was restored earlier this month after the Commerce Department renegotiated the award, though it’s unclear what — if any — changes were made.

In March, the Social Security Administration ended two programs allowing Maine providers to share birth and death information electronically, a move that meant new parents would have to travel to one of eight Social Security offices to register their newborns for a Social Security number.

The agency reversed that decision within 48 hours.

The acting Social Security administrator, Leland Dudek, took that move in retribution against Mills over her war of words with Trump, despite earlier statements calling it a “mistake.” He even brushed off a senior aide’s warning that it would increase fraud. In an email, Dudek acknowledged “improper payments” would increase, but it was necessary in order to punish a “petulant child.”

And on April 1, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins informed Mills that her department was pulling funding for programs that feed schoolchildren, children in day care, at-risk youth outside school hours and adults in care settings. In a letter to the governor, Rollins warned that “this was just the beginning” for Maine because of alleged Title IX violations.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration signed a settlement with Maine agreeing to “refrain from freezing, terminating, or otherwise interfering with the state of Maine’s access to United States Department of Agriculture funds” over “alleged violations of Title IX.” In exchange, Maine dropped its lawsuit challenging the freeze.

In April, Bondi announced that her department was pulling $1.5 million in “nonessential” funding from the Maine prison system because of a transgender inmate housed in a women’s prison.