Gov. Janet Mills Doesn’t Know It Yet, But She’s an ‘Insurrectionist’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I want to wade into a very controversial topic. I want to be very careful. It’s the issue of whether biological men who have transitioned to the female gender should compete in female sports. And what is the reaction of those who say they should versus the federal government, under President Donald Trump’s executive orders, that said it’s not fair to women?

And the locust classicists or the state is the—the best example is now Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, in the White House, said she was going to resist that.

Donald Trump issued an executive order saying that all sports programs in the public sphere have to make sure that only biological women that remain women compete in women’s sports. And the same as for male sports. And she’s resisting. As is the California Legislature and, apparently, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a lot of blue states.

There’s two fundamental issues we should all watch here.

No. 1: Do states have the right to resist the federal government? Donald Trump says they don’t. And he has threatened to cut off massive federal funds to Maine—which would be devastating to the economy—to force her to comply with federal law.

Note that when former President Joe Biden issued executive orders, if people on the right opposed them, they went to court. If they lost, they followed it.

But this is a neo-Confederate idea that goes back to 1832 with South Carolina and tariffs. And in the 1850s, in the South, when the Antebellum South said, “We’re not gonna listen to the federal government,” the federal government said, “Then you’re in insurrectionary mode.” And we know what happened.

We have 600 sanctuary jurisdictions in the United States on matters of illegal immigration, where they say, “We’re not gonna turn over illegal aliens that have committed a crime and are held. We’re not gonna turn them over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” The same issue now with trans.

Janet Mills may not know it, but she’s an insurrectionist. She’s a neo-Confederate. She is taking states’ rights to the extreme. Rather than saying, “I oppose the federal government. I will go to court to stop you. But if I lose, I will comply because the states are subordinate to the federal”—she’s not doing that. She’s right in the spirit of the old Confederacy.

The other issue, very importantly, is the trans issue itself. And I wanna be very careful. Transsexualism, transgenderism is an ancient phenomenon. It appears throughout the medieval world. It appears in late antiquity. It appears in early antiquity.

I can cite you chapter and verse from the poems of Catullus to the novels of “Satyricon,” of Petronius, “The Satyricon,” of men who dress up like women. Both as transvestites who are still, I guess you’d say heterosexual, but they have a fetish to wear women’s clothes or who really want to be women. In the case of a poem or two, they castrate themselves. It’s found in ancient history.

And statistically, if you go back before this controversy happened, it was a very small number of the population. About less than 1% identified as transgendered or transsexual. Then it became, in the last decade, the next civil rights frontier. And all of a sudden, we had universities where students were polled at 10% or 20% or 30%, thought they might want to transition. It became almost a cult following.

But in the process, we did something that no one ever imagined. People on the left side of the spectrum, the liberal side, had always argued that under Title IX women should get the same amount of support for their sports as men do, even if they didn’t make the same amount of revenue in football, basketball, etc. And America came over to that position—slow, but maybe begrudgingly, but they accepted it. And they promoted women’s sports. And it was successful.

And now biological males with a muscular skeletal framework have enormous physical advantages over females. We all know that. And they are systematically undermining women’s sports as a civil rights issue—and the Left doesn’t know what to do because it’s also an anti-feminist, anti-woman issue.

But there’s another thing to think about. There are transitioned or transsexual males. These are people born female with all the characteristics—muscular, skeletal—of females, of women, and they then either have operations or hormone treatments or both and become men. And guess what? When they compete in sports, they don’t do very well.

In other words, transgendered men cannot beat biological men, which brings up the issue: If you’re transgendered, isn’t there still a difference biologically, hormonally from people born into that sex? In other words, if women transition to males and they cannot beat biological males, why do we keep insisting that males who transition as women are no different than biological women when, in fact, we know they are, they know they are?

And Donald Trump has tried to address this issue both in purposes of honesty and fairness and equality for women. And these state governors and legislatures that are resisting him are really breaking the federal law, but more importantly, they’re echoing and they’re resonating the old Confederacy.

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