Minnesota Goes on the Offense, Sues Trump to Protect Trans Kids

“I’m not waiting for Trump to sue Minnesota. Today, Minnesota is suing him and his administration because we will not participate in this shameful bullying.”

Keith Ellison // Lauri Shaull // Creative Commons

Minnesota has become the latest state to sue the Department of Justice over Trumpian policies—and the first to preemptively sue over the president’s unrelenting campaign to strip trans people of their rights. This comes after months of threats from federal agencies and an investigation into the Minnesota State High School League over its trans-friendly bylaws.

“I’m not waiting for Trump to sue Minnesota,” the state’s Attorney General Keith Ellison told reporters on April 22. “Today, Minnesota is suing him and his administration because we will not participate in this shameful bullying.”

In Trump’s first days and weeks back in the Oval Office, he penned a record-breaking number of executive orders, including several targeting trans people. Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” called upon states, schools and sports leagues across the country to discriminate against trans women and girls in athletics, barring them from gendered locker rooms and teams. Otherwise, the order says, these institutions would face defunding and further legal action—a threat that Minnesota asserts is “arbitrary and capricious.”

Minnesota Lawsuit

Trump’s order does not carry the weight of law; even more, many legal scholars and courts across the country have deemed it unconstitutional because it violates trans people’s rights and states’ rights.

“On February 20, I issued a formal legal opinion saying that the executive order does not override Minnesota's protections against discrimination,” Ellison said. “In fact, complying with the sports executive order would violate the Minnesota Human Rights Act. That opinion is legally binding in Minnesota unless a court of law says otherwise.”

In recent months, Ellison says his office received at least three letters from the Department of Justice threatening to freeze funding for various Minnesota academic institutions—including that for Metropolitan State University, which has no athletic programs—because the Trump administration asserts that Minnesota’s trans inclusion policies violate sex-based protections under Title IX.

Anti-discrimination laws have been interpreted to uphold trans people’s rights, at least within recent years. In the majority opinion for Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that “discrimination on the basis of homosexuality or transgender status” requires someone to “intentionally” treat individuals differently “because of their sex.”

“Title IX does not require the recipients of federal funds to discriminate against students because of their gender identity,” the complaint filed by Minnesota says. “The Constitution does not authorize the Federal Defendants to amend Title IX by Executive Order. Nor does it authorize the Federal Defendants to retroactively change the terms of Congressionally authorized grants. The Federal Defendants cannot invoke an erroneous interpretation of Title IX to terminate or withhold federal grants from Minnesota schools because the President has different policy preferences about how transgender athletes are allowed to compete in Minnesota.”

Debunked lists and statistics continue to proliferate, purporting to show that hundreds of trans women are dominating women’s athletics—lists that include sports like billiards, darts, poker, esports, and oyster shucking, and that feature people who are falsely characterized as trans. The reality is that there are only a handful of trans women athletes competing at the elite level. In December, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association said he knew of “less than ten” trans athletes in NCAA sports.

Moreover, science does not support the notion that all trans women have a categorical advantage over presumed-cis women across the board. “There is not one discrete biomarker that allows easy comparison of athletes’ bodies to each other in terms of performance,” a scientific review by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport found.

Earlier this month, the DOJ sued Maine over its trans inclusion policies, attempting to cut funding for school lunch programs. A Bush-appointed judge issued a temporary restraining order on the freeze, stating that Maine “demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim that the defendants’ actions were taken without observance of procedure required by law, and further that the State has established a likelihood of irreparable harm.”