Trump’s DOJ Sues Minnesota to Force Anti-Trans School Bathroom And Sports Ban

"This new suit is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that's already been in litigation for months,” the state AG said.

Minnesota Governor Walz // Lorie Shaull // Wikimedia Commons

Major media outlets are reporting that Trump’s Department of Justice is suing the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League over trans-inclusive sports policies. They are only partially correct.

What they leave out, as they often do, is that the lawsuit goes far beyond sports. Instead, it is a political Trojan Horse—a vessel to carry out legally mandated trans segregation in bathrooms and locker rooms, colloquially known as a “trans bathroom ban,” and to redefine “sex” in the eyes of the law. Moreover, it targets the Minnesota Human Rights Act, arguing that the law “discriminates on the basis of sex against female students” in violation of Title IX.

The proposed resolution outlined in the lawsuit against Minnesota schools.

“For intimate spaces, such as multi-person locker rooms and bathrooms, the biological differences between males and females are relevant and make the sexes dissimilarly situated,” the complaint that is supposedly about athletic fairness says. Minnesota’s equal rights policy, therefore, “conflicts with and eliminates the biological basis that justifies intentionally separating athletics and intimate spaces by sex,” the DOJ concludes.

The lawsuit further deploys all the usual Trumpian tricks: vague language that could apply to students, faculty or anyone who enters a school; the false assertion that executive orders inherently supersede state law; and a convoluted definition of “sex” derived purely from right-wing extremist ideology. In this case, the complaint utilizes the “sex” definition from Trump’s Executive Order 14168, which would separate people based on their “biological classification as either male or female [...] at conception.” But people cannot be assigned sex at conception; at that point, they are a clump of cells without any visible or detectable sex traits whatsoever.

However, basic human biology has never curbed the Trump regime before and it’s unlikely to do so now. The DOJ outright denies the existence of transgender people as legitimate. In the filing, trans women are called “trans-identifying boys” or “trans-identifying males.” It does not seem to even mention the existence of transgender boys and men.

“We have been living in a world in Minnesota that is inclusive of LGBTQ people for a long time, and these issues have never been prevalent—it’s not been a problem until we had a federal government that decided that we had to eradicate these people,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, the first openly transgender member of the Minnesota Legislature and a founding member of its Queer Caucus, in an interview with Erin in the Morning.

Data tells us these policies are dangerous. They result in forced outing for kids whose classmates may not know they are trans. They stoke violence and bullying in bathrooms by encouraging students and faculty alike to interrogate children’s sex organs if the child doesn’t align with what they think a “girl” looks like. And they promote harmful, sometimes deadly myths painting trans kids as predators in school bathrooms or athletes weaponizing their transness to get a leg up in sports.

“Things are getting harder. It’s looking uglier. The fight is getting dirtier,” Finke said. “But the Queer Caucus and the people who’ve been doing this work in Minnesota really have embedded trans dignity into the state’s mechanisms.”

The fact Republicans lead with the “sports” framing is no accident—it is a calculated political ploy. “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues,” Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, told CNN in 2022.

Indeed, the examples of supposed Title IX violations cited in the lawsuit include two instances of school sports teams that included trans athletes and at least one incident where a student simply did not want to be in a bathroom with someone they thought might be trans. No sports or competition appear to be involved, and it’s unclear why that student couldn’t simply use a single-stall bathroom or changing room if they didn’t want to be around a trans person.

The lawsuit also calls for an ongoing “monitoring and enforcement system” to weed out trans students from sports teams or bathrooms that align with their gender identity—by what means, however, it does not say. It only serves to manufacture a moral panic over the trans children that the feds say “have invaded” these spaces. It further chastizes Minnesota for its “refusal to comply” with Trump’s anti-trans demands.

Finke added the Minnesota government is fighting back. Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison have been allies to trans rights.

“In April of last year, I sued the Trump administration to stop them from targeting trans kids who just want to play on their school team,” Ellison said in a recent statement. “This new suit is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that’s already been in litigation for months. I will continue to stand up to the Trump administration and do everything in my power to stop them from bullying vulnerable children in Minnesota.”

This is the third state the Trump regime has sued over trans-inclusive policies, following legal actions targeting Maine and California threatening to cut school funding—namely programs that provide lunch money to hungry school children. Legal battles are ongoing. Minnesota is also part of a coalition of states suing federal officials over discriminatory anti-trans policies.