State lawmaker behind ‘trans refuge’ law blasts Trump order on trans athletes in school

[MUSIC PLAYING] NINA MOINI: Our top story this afternoon, the White House announced President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order this afternoon banning transgender women and girls from participating in female sports at schools and colleges. The order comes on National Girls and Women in Sports Day. A little background, it's still unclear what the order, titled Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports, will entail and what its scope will be. But it will provide insight on how the Trump administration plans to interpret Title IX, best known for its role in pursuing gender equity in athletics and preventing sexual harassment on campuses.

Every administration has the authority to issue its own interpretations of Title IX. The Biden administration used the law to interpret that LGBTQ-plus students would be protected under federal law and provided new safeguards for victims of campus sexual assault. But the policy stopped short of explicitly addressing transgender athletes. Biden's policies received a lot of pushback from Republican-led states.

Joining me to talk about how this executive order could impact transgender athletes and the trans community in Minnesota is representative Leigh Finke. She's the first openly transgender person to ever serve in the state legislature. And in 2023, she authored a bill to protect access to gender-affirming care, making Minnesota one of the first trans refuge states in the nation. Representative Finke, thank you for being here this afternoon.

LEIGH FINKE: Thank you so much for the invitation.

NINA MOINI: With many of the executive orders that have been coming down over the past just few weeks, one of the first things we try to do is just take a step, take a beat, and try to understand what this might actually mean. What is your understanding of what this executive order is saying and who it will impact?

LEIGH FINKE: The thing that this executive order is saying primarily, and it is what all of the other executive orders are saying, is that trans people should not be participating in our society, right? We are separating people out from the military. We are separating people out from using the bathroom, using the locker room.

We are taking trans people out of society. We are removing them from our data from the CDC. And now we're saying these young people who are playing sports should be removed as well.

NINA MOINI: How could this executive order impact transgender athletes in our state? Because I'm sure a lot of your constituents are looking to you saying, how does this impact us on a state level?

LEIGH FINKE: Yeah, in Minnesota, we have had the largest number of trans athletes in youth sports in the country over the last decade. And over the same time frame, we have seen the largest increase in cisgender girls participation in youth sports. Minnesota shows us very clearly that inclusion of trans people in sports is not a threat to cisgender girls' participation in sports.

What we really have is a manufactured crisis. We do not have a high population of trans girls specifically who play sports. There are several states in the US who have banned trans girls from sports, who were unable to find a single trans girl participating in youth athletics. It's just not a real problem. It's a problem only that it makes a little bit of sense if you give it just a little bit of thought. But as soon as you look at the problem, you see it's not there, and it's really about harm to the trans community.

NINA MOINI: Do you expect leaders here in Minnesota to push back on this, or are you working on anything right now?

LEIGH FINKE: I'm doing everything that I can, as I always do, to ensure that we do not comply with executive orders that have not actually changed laws in Minnesota. Trans inclusion is the law. It is very clear in our Minnesota Human Rights Act. It is very clear throughout our statutes that we do not separate out and remove trans people from our lived experiences of society. And I will be continuing to do that work at every opportunity that I can and with every member of our Minnesota government that I can.

NINA MOINI: What about educators, what about Minnesota schools and universities that would obviously be looking at this executive order and thinking about how they would be impacted, and particularly under Title IX? Have you talked with any leaders there about how they plan to respond?

LEIGH FINKE: I haven't had a chance since we found this out that this order was coming, which we found out last night, to have those conversations, I would really stress to those administrators to take a very serious look at what the current reality is. A lot of what people will or will not say will not actually affect individual trans people in their programs. Rather, it's going to have a very harmful effect on the people who are listening.

So if I am a parent and I have a trans kid, and that trans kid may not be in sports in a school district, but that school district or its administration comes out and says, we will not allow trans people to participate in sports, the message is still very clear. My kid's not really welcome here-- not really. And we don't need to overstate, over comply, or comply for something that's not solving a real problem.

NINA MOINI: You alluded to some reporting from 2021 from the AP about just how many people were even in situations like this. Why do you think this issue receives such outsized attention when there are very few, relatively, cases?

LEIGH FINKE: Yeah, it's the kind of problem that people can viscerally grasp onto without having to think about it. And part of what makes it so palatable is the patriarchal undertaking of it, right? Girls are inherently not as good at things as boys, and therefore boys should not be allowed. And it fundamentally misunderstands both trans identity, but also biology and reality and what it means to participate in an equal society.

The president of the NCAA just told Congress that there are 510,000 student athletes in the NCAA, and there are 10-- 10 of those students are trans. It is a literal nonexistent problem. It's just there to grab onto for political reasons.

NINA MOINI: You alluded to how it can make people feel. It was a big talking point during the 2024 election cycle. These were promises that President Trump made that he is now seeming to try to do what he can to follow through on. In the past few weeks, what has the reaction been like from people that you have been communicating with, from your constituents, as some of these plans begin to really unfold?

LEIGH FINKE: Yeah, it's terrifying, right? I cannot overstate what it feels like to be a member of a community who is just seeing our rights removed, right? There's very little outcry from the broader population. And one of the things I think is important is that a lot of people will say, Trump is just doing what he said he would do. And for almost everything else he is doing, he did not say he would do that. But for us, he did, right?

So if we have our national Democrats saying, we can't follow him down every single rabbit hole, which ones are we going to stop following him down, right? Because he didn't say he was going to gut the Department of Education and turn over the government to a billionaire. But he did say, trans people, you're done.

And now we're living under that, and it's extremely scary. It's extremely terrifying. And we warned about this, and now we are living in it. And we can't just allow it to happen because this is what he said he would do.

NINA MOINI: And I ask this not to make light of anything. But I really want to know from people right now what people are doing to remain engaged, remain hopeful. After the election, we know that a lot of people began to tune out. There were numbers around, at least people tuning in to the news, and a lot of people were tuning out. Do you feel like that's still the case?

LEIGH FINKE: I'll say in the trans community, I don't think people are tuning out so much as they are tuning in to other frequencies, right? Trans people have had exceptional visibility over the last 10 years. But for the entire history before that, we haven't. We have been thriving regardless of whether or not our president gives us permission to thrive.

So I think what we're seeing is a real turn to our local communities, a turn to mutual aid, art, queer expression, and reframing what it's going to look like to be trans in America because there's no reprieve coming, right? This is what we're going to have for quite a long time. And it's going to be up to us to reframe how we understand our presence and purpose in this country so that we can survive and thrive and continue to be wonderful, which we will.

NINA MOINI: Representative Finke, thank you so much for your time this afternoon.

LEIGH FINKE: Thank you for the invitation.

NINA MOINI: That was DFL Representative Leigh Finke.