Cassidy Carlisle was in seventh grade, she said as he had to change in the same dressing room as a trans -gender student.

During a gym class at Presque Isle Middle School in Northern Maine six years ago, she said, she went into the dressing room to find a biological man who would change with her and other girls. She claims she was told by administrators that if she tried to avoid changing with the transpendar, she would risk being late to class.

“It was really my first experience of just knowing that something isn’t right, but not knowing what to do with it,” Carlisle told Pakinomist Digital in an exclusive interview. Pakinomist Digital has reached 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 changed to add gender identity as its own protected class that joined other protected classes such as sex, sexual orientation, disability, race, color and religion. The law specifically says that refusing a person equal opportunities in athletic programs is educational discrimination.

The transsexual student was only in the girls’ dressing room for about a week, Carlisle claims before mysterious vanishing. But the memory of the experience stuck with her.

Memory especially sat with her in her adolescence in high school when she found out she would compete with a trans athlete on the state Nordic skiing.

It was an athlete that she was familiar with. She had already lost for the trans-athlete in cross-country competitions in previous years.

When her father told her to meet the athlete again in skiing, Carlisle didn’t think it happened.

“I was like, ‘Oh, it’s just something I kind of hear about on the news.… It won’t happen to me,” Cassidy remembered.

Maine -Universities agree to keep transnry athletes out of women’s sports after Trump admin breaks funding

Maine High School -Student Cassidy Carlisle running in a track event (With permission from Cassidy Carlisle)

But it happened to her.

“The defeat that comes with it at that moment is heartbreaking,” Carlisle said. “I’m just in shock in a way. I didn’t believe it. … I didn’t think it happened to me.”

As a child, Carlisle finished her co-ed hockey team specifically because she felt she “couldn’t keep up” with the boys. Even after committing to a girls-only sport, she couldn’t escape the physical disadvantage that came across to be facing biological men.

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On top of the anxiety of the situation, Carlisle felt that she couldn’t talk about it.

“I was silent for a while,” Carlisle said. “It’s very hard to talk 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 students want to be injured or shouted at or aim average comments from people. And the reality of it, with the state I live in that can happen a lot.”

What she could do was vote in the November election. As a first -time selector, she cast her vote with the question of trans athletes in girls sports at the forefront.

ONE National Exit Poll Made by the affected women for America Legislative Action Committee found that 70% of moderate voters saw the issue of “Donald Trump’s resistance to trans -bright boys and men playing girls and women’s sports and by transient boys and men using girls and women’s bathrooms” as important to them.

And 6% said that was the most important question of all, while 44% said it was “very important.”

When the Republican Maine State Rep. Earlier this year, Laurel Libby spoke against another trans -athlete who won a girls Pole Vault competition in February, Carlisle suddenly had an opportunity to influence the issue.

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Libby’s social media posts identifying the transgressive threw the entire state into an ongoing cultural war. It became Ground Zero for a national battle for the question led by the Trump administration against several Democratic controlled states like Maine after Trump signed an executive order to tackle the question 5 February.

Suddenly, thousands of people in Maine spoke against the laws of the state, enabling Trans -Including in Girls Sports and Dressing Room, all with the president’s support.

So Carlisle came along.

On February 27, Carlisle made a trip to the White House with several other current and former female athletes who have been influenced by trans -cluttering, including Payton McNabb and Selina Soule. There they met with court lawyer Pam Bondi and several other state attorneys General and shared their stories.

Carlisle could not avoid noticing an absence in 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 the cases in her own hands.

Last weekend, she gave a speech in front of Maine Capitol, where she spoke with hundreds of other residents there to protest head of government Janet Mills for her, who continued to enable Trans athletes in girls sports.

It was the second protest against Mills outside Capitol in a month after the march on Mills Rally March 1st.

The Trump administration takes aggressive measures to get the state to comply with the wishes of Carlisle and other residents who want women protected from trans -cluttering.

On March 17, the Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced that if they found the Maine Department of Education, Maine Principals’ Association and Greely High School in violation of Title IX to continue activating Trans -Including in Girl Sports.

In the announcement, the department said Maine had 10 days to correct her policies through a signed agreement or risk reference to the US Ministry of Justice for appropriate action.

Trump has already shown a willingness to reduce federal funding to enforce these policies. He paused $ 175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania and paused temporarily funding to the University of Maine System last week until a review had found that the system was in full compliance with Trump’s orders.

The deadline for the rest of the Maine to comply will come up within the week.

“I really hope Maine complies because our schools need federal funding and we can’t risk losing it,” Carlisle said. “It would really hurt our state to lose the federal funding. So I hope our government can get it together.”