Cassidy Carlisle was in seventh grade, she said, when had to change in the same locker room as a transgender student.
During a gym class at Presque Isle Middle School in northern Maine six years ago, she said, she walked into the locker room to find a biological male who would change with her and other girls. She alleges she was told by administrators that if she tried to avoid changing with the trans student, she would risk being late to class.
“That was really my first experience in just knowing that something isn’t right, but not knowing what to do with that,” Carlisle told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. Fox News Digital has reached out to Presque Isle Middle School for comment.
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Gender identity was first included in the Maine Human Rights Act as part of the definition of sexual orientation in 2005. In 2021, the law was amended to add gender identity as its own protected class, joining other protected classes such as sex, sexual orientation, disability, race, color and religion. The law specifically says that denying a person equal opportunity in athletic programs is education discrimination.
The transgender student was only in the girls locker room for about a week, Carlisle claims, before mysteriously vanishing. But the memory of the experience stuck with her.
The memory especially stuck with her in her junior year of high school, when she found out she would be competing with a trans athlete on the state Nordic skiing team.
It was an athlete with whom she was familiar. She had already lost to the trans athlete in cross-country competitions in previous years.
When her father told her she would have to face the athlete again in skiing, Carlisle didn’t believe it was happening.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s only something I kind of hear about on the news. … It’s not going to happen to me,” Cassidy recalled.
But it did happen to her.
“The defeat that comes with that in that moment is heartbreaking,” Carlisle said. “I’m just in shock in a way. I didn’t believe it. … I didn’t think it was happening to me.”
As a child, Carlisle quit her co-ed hockey team specifically because she felt she “couldn’t keep up” with the boys. Then, even after committing to a girls-only sport, she couldn’t escape the physical disadvantage that came with facing biological males.
On top of the anxiety of the situation, Carlisle felt like she couldn’t speak out about it.
“I stayed silent for a while,” Carlisle said. “It’s very hard to speak up if you don’t have a platform to do it on. … Backlash is a huge thing. I’m a high school student. No high school student wants to be hurt or yelled at or said mean comments by people. And the reality of it, with the state that I live in, that could very much happen.”
What she could do was vote in the November election. As a first-time voter, she cast her ballot with the issue of trans athletes in girls sports at the forefront.
A national exit poll conducted by the Concerned Women for America legislative action committee found that 70% of moderate voters saw the issue of “Donald Trump’s opposition to transgender boys and men playing girls and women’s sports and of transgender boys and men using girls and women’s bathrooms” as important to them.
And 6% said it was the most important issue of all, while 44% said it was “very important.”
When Republican Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby spoke out earlier this year against another trans athlete who won a girls pole vault competition in February, Carlisle suddenly gained an opportunity to influence the issue.
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Libby’s social media post identifying the trans athlete thrust the entire state into an ongoing culture war. It became ground zero for a national battle over the issue waged by the Trump administration against several Democrat-controlled states like Maine after Trump signed an executive order to address the issue Feb. 5.
All of a sudden, thousands of people in Maine were speaking out against the state’s laws that enable trans inclusion in girls sports and locker rooms, all with the backing of the president.
So Carlisle joined in.
On Feb. 27, Carlisle made a trip to the White House with several other current and former female athletes who have been affected by trans inclusion, including Payton McNabb and Selina Soule. There, they met with Attorney General Pam Bondi and several other state attorneys general and shared their stories.
Carlisle couldn’t help but notice an absence at the White House that day,
“None of our AGs were there from our state,” Carlisle said.
So, when Carlisle returned to her state, she took matters into her own hands.
Last weekend, she delivered a speech in front of the Maine Capitol, speaking to hundreds of other residents there to protest Gov. Janet Mills for her continued enabling of trans athletes in girls sports.
It was the second protest against Mills outside the Capitol in a month after the March on Mills rally March 1.
The Trump administration is taking aggressive measures to get the state to adhere to the wishes of Carlisle and other residents who want females protected from trans inclusion.
On March 17, the Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced that if found the Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals’ Association and Greely High School in violation of Title IX for continuing to enable trans inclusion in girls sports.
In the announcement, the department said Maine had 10 days to correct its policies through a signed agreement or risk referral to the U.S. Department of Justice for appropriate action.
Trump has already shown a willingness to cut federal funding to enforce these policies. He paused $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania and temporarily paused funding to the University of Maine System last week until a review had found the system was in full compliance with Trump’s orders.
The deadline for the rest of Maine to comply is coming up within the week.
“I really hope that Maine complies because our schools need the federal funding, and we can’t risk losing that,” Carlisle said. “It would really really hurt our state to lose that federal funding. So, I hope our government can get it together.”
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