How the Trans Debate Fractured Maine’s Cooperative Political Culture

During her fifth and final term in the Maine House of Representatives in 2022, Beth O’Connor felt the state’s political winds change in a perilous direction.

O’Connor had proposed what she believed to be a commonsense bill to ban men in women’s sports.

But instead of seeing the usual bipartisan spirit that Republicans in the state legislature had come to expect from their Democratic neighbors, the proposal was met with a flood of ugly messages from special interest groups claiming she was inventing a fake crisis — an argument she knew to be false given that she had personally heard many stories.