During her fifth and final term in the Maine House of Representatives in 2022, Beth O'Connor felt the state's political winds change in a perilous direction.

O'Connor had proposed what she believed to be a commonsense bill to ban men in women's sports.

But instead of seeing the usual bipartisan spirit that Republicans in the state legislature had come to expect from their Democratic neighbors, the proposal was met with a flood of ugly messages from special interest groups claiming she was inventing a fake crisis — an argument she knew to be false given that she had personally heard many stories of trans-identifying men displacing female athletes, both in Maine and elsewhere.

"My email inbox was full of threats," she told National Review. "I got phone calls telling me that this wasn't happening anywhere. But I knew it was happening because there were instances of it, and people talk. People weren’t happy about it at all. But I was so happy to be done and just retire from politics . . . it was getting more and more difficult to work with the Democrats at all. They were in lockstep."

The Democrats in the legislature prevented the bill from getting off the ground. This marked the beginning of the radical capture of Maine's government, O'Connor said.

The transgender debate would reach a fever pitch in February, two years after O'Connor introduced her bill, when Maine's Democratic governor Janet Mills informed President Trump during a televised inauguration event that her state would not comply with his executive order prohibiting men in women's sports. Trump made clear that she would regret it.

In early March, the Trump administration put the Maine Department of Education on notice that it is violating federal civil rights law by continuing to allow males to compete in women's sports. The Department of Health and Human Service's Office for Civil Rights informed Mills and the state's attorney general that Maine is in violation of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational programs or activities, and that federal funding is in jeopardy. The letter notes the more than $700,000 in federal funding the state's education department receives.

Shortly before that kerfuffle, GOP Maine State Representative Laurel Libby spoke out about the issue, at great political cost. She wrote a Facebook post noting the disparity between a male high school pole vaulter's performance in the boys’ versus the girls’ division. He placed fifth in a boys' competition last year and then won the girls' state championship this year, leading Greely High School to win the state track-and-field championship by one point. House Democrats subsequently censured Libby for her post.

It's perhaps unsurprising that the transgender debate led to a true clash of values in Maine, which has historically been a political maverick among the progressive northeast states, thanks to its blue-collar backbone in lobstering and lumber.

Like Nebraska, Maine in general elections allocates two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner and one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district. Unlike the winner-take-all systems of Massachusetts, Vermont, and the rest of New England, the Pine Tree State's gives a voice to rural counties beyond the affluent coastal areas. In 2016, Donald Trump won Maine’s second district, covering most of the state outside Portland and Augusta, leading to a split electoral vote in the state.

But like in many states, the pandemic shifted Maine's political makeup.

"What happened, and it's almost irreversible, during Covid we had an abundance of people coming in from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania," Republican former governor of Maine Paul LePage told National Review. "I mean a lot of them, a quarter of a million people. About 50,000 people went to the north, but a significant amount of people went to the south, York and Cumberland County and Sagadahoc. That made it more liberal. We were outnumbered."

There are "two Maines": Maine and northern Massachusetts, LePage said. About 60 percent of the population lives south of Augusta.

"That's the sad part," he said. "They've very, very liberal, and they get all the votes, and they get all the representatives, and they tip the scale. The rest of Maine is very, very conservative."

LePage, who served as governor for two terms from 2011 to 2019, is temperamentally and politically closer to Trump than his fellow New England Republicans, Governor Phil Scott of Vermont and former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, who bent the knee to left-wing gender ideology as the head of the NCAA after leaving office.

Under Baker's tenure, the NCAA allowed men in women's sports, with a testosterone restriction, despite Baker admitting during a Senate hearing that men have a natural physical advantage. In February, however, the NCAA succumbed to pressure from the Trump administration and ended male inclusion in the women's category.

Following LePage's tenure, Mills took over and appointed Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who in 2023 unilaterally undertook to kick Trump off the ballot on the theory that he is an insurrectionist and therefore disqualified as a candidate under the 14th Amendment.

Earlier this month, Maine's attorney general, Aaron Frey, also doubled down on forcing women to compete against men in sports. He filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture's withdrawal of federal funding from Maine, on the grounds that the state has ignored multiple warnings from Trump.

While the governor's office goes to war with Trump, the Democratic-dominated state legislature is also silencing and ostracizing conservatives, such as Libby, who dare side with the vast majority of Americans in the trans sports debate. A January recent New York Times/Ipsos survey found that 79 percent of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, don't think men who identify as women should be allowed to participate in women's sports.

Libby argues that in censuring her, Maine's Democratic lawmakers disenfranchised residents in her district, which includes the town of Auburn. In mid-March, Libby and six of her constituents filed a federal lawsuit against House Speaker Ryan Fecteau and House Clerk Robert Hunt alleging that she has been unconstitutionally stripped of her right to speak and vote on the House floor.

While being censured doesn't necessarily mean you can't vote, "the speaker determined that that would be the punishment according to one rule," Libby told National Review.

It was the first time someone had been censured for something that happened outside the statehouse.

"I didn't make a statement about politics or anything, I just laid out the story and the facts," she said. "They don't want to have a conversation about the actual issue because they know they don’t have the vast population with them."

Libby maintains that the legislature has gone rogue and is disregarding the interest of Mainers.

"This is an agenda that Augusta Democrats are advancing," she said. "I do not believe that this is in line with, and I've heard from many of them . . . folks around the state including Democrats. I don't believe that the Augusta Democrats that are pushing this woke agenda and peddling this woke ideology represent mainstream Mainers."

The weekend following Libby's post, the male high school pole vaulter she had written about, Soren Stark-Chessa, won a Nordic ski competition, displacing a woman on the podium. Last winter, the Western Maine Conference named Stark-Chessa to its girls' Nordic skiing all-conference team, one of only ten skiers to earn that recognition. Stark-Chessa has taken titles from female athletes across winter and summer sports. In running, he went from being average in boys' races to winning the Fastest Sophomore Girl award at Maine's largest high school cross-country race, in Belfast, Maine, in 2023.

High school senior Cassidy Carlisle of Presque Isle, Maine, thought nothing of it when she heard a male athlete had been making his way through the women's Nordic skiing circuit.

"So I went to my first qualifier race, and I was competing against him," Carlisle, a storyteller for IW Features, told National Review of Stark-Chessa. "I lost that race to him."

They had both qualified for the Maine Nordic skiing team, but Carlisle was below him in the rankings. At an event in New Hampshire, she lost to him in the first race but beat him in the second race, which meant she'd get a head start for the third race.

"I was going up a hill, and I saw a Maine uniform pass me and immediately my heart sank, and I watched as he crossed the finish line ahead of me," she said. "It was like, you have your competitors that you always want to beat, but in this moment, it was such a mixed feeling. Because I really shouldn't have the competitive drive that I need to beat a biological male. It was so defeating."

Carlisle has only defeated Stark-Chessa once. Every other time he has defeated her, she said. Carlisle said she expected Mills, a female in government, to fight for women rather than invite male intrusion in women's sports. Many young women feel abandoned.

"'I'm a Democrat from Augusta,' one of them said to me, 'I've got three girls. What's going on? My party doesn't represent me,'" Libby said of recent constituent calls to her office. "I've been hearing that message over and over again the last couple of weeks."

"This has been going on for longer than people like to admit in the state of Maine," Carlisle said.

While Maine's leftist government fashions itself as the face of Trump resistance, the state's true politics are not that extreme, O'Connor said. The Democrats in the legislature won their majority by about 60 votes across the entire state in November, not exactly a mandate for radical rule, Libby said.

"I honestly feel from knocking on over 5,000 doors over my years that the state of Maine actually leans conservative," O'Connor said. "I don't even think this is an 80-20 issue, I think it's higher than that; people just don't speak."

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