A ballot question seeking to limit transgender students’ rights in sports and access to school facilities will not appear on the November ballot, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday.

The citizens’ initiative, filed by a group called Protect Girls Sports, initially qualified for the ballot but later met a legal challenge over the signature collection process, which a group of citizens said broke several state rules and resulted in invalid signatures.

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows agreed and rejected nearly 4,000 signatures, leaving the group 500 names below the required threshold. A Superior Court judge upheld that decision last month, but the group appealed.

Protect Girls Sports’ arguments to the Supreme Judicial Court on July 1 hinged on about 1,500 signatures collected by four out-of-state circulators who didn’t check a box on a required form saying they would submit to Maine’s jurisdiction.

Bellows threw out the signatures of those four circulators, but an attorney for the ballot initiative group argued that she improperly relied on a court order from several years ago to create that form, and that she did not have the right to invalidate signatures on that basis.

The high court, in a unanimous decision Friday, said Bellows had not only the right but the obligation to invalidate those signatures. They wrote that requiring signature collectors from out of state to consent to the state’s laws was not a novel idea, but a practice in line with the Maine Constitution.

“As a result of the Secretary’s proper invalidation of the signatures collected by these four circulators, the petition fell below the constitutional threshold for an initiative petition to be submitted to the voters of Maine,” the court wrote. “The Secretary thus correctly determined the petition to be invalid.”

If approved by voters, the initiative would have required participation in school sports and use of facilities including bathrooms and locker rooms to be based on a student’s sex assigned at birth, rather than their gender identity.

In a separate federal lawsuit filed earlier this month, one of those signature gatherers and three people who signed petitions also challenged the decision to invalidate the signatures. Protect Girls Sports is not a named party in that suit but supports the plaintiffs’ arguments.

Although the question will not appear on the November ballot, the petitioners are allowed to keep collecting names; per the state’s constitution, their initial signatures only remain valid for a year after the petition was filed with the secretary’s office. In this case, that occurred on Nov. 3, 2025.

Protect Girls Sports said in a Friday afternoon statement that it disagreed with the court’s decision. Leyland Streiff of Brunswick, the lead petitioner, said his commitment to “the rights of females that simply want single-sex private spaces & competitive sports in schools” remains unchanged.

“Our committee continues to believe that the sex-based civil rights of Maine’s most
vulnerable population — its children — deserve protecting,” Streiff said. “We don’t believe Mainers want sex-based discrimination to continue in our public schools.”

Bellows said in a statement Friday afternoon that she was grateful for but not surprised by the ruling. She said citizen initiatives are an important tool of direct democracy, and voters should be able to have confidence in their integrity.

“This petition did not meet the legal requirements for inclusion and therefore did not qualify for the ballot after our legal review,” she said.

Gerald Butler collects signatures for the committee Protect Girls Sports’s citizens initiative in the lobby outside Hammond Lumber Auditorium on Nov. 4, 2025. (Joe Phelan/Staff photographer)<?xml version="1.0"?> Purchase this image

David Farmer, the campaign manager of the multi-organization committee formed to oppose the ballot question, said it was a good day for the rule of law in Maine.

That committee includes EqualityMaine, the Maine Women’s Lobby and GLAD Law, an LGBTQ legal defense organization. The groups have consistently criticized the initiative for receiving $800,000 from Wisconsin billionaire and conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein.

“The proposed ballot question targeted an entire community,” Farmer said. “Questions about sports and sports participation can be passionate, but Maine doesn’t need a billionaire to tell us what to do or how to do it.”

Gia Drew, director of EqualityMaine, said transgender students deserve the same opportunities as their peers, and said Maine can’t allow billionaires to, “manipulate our system of laws and procedures in an attempt to turn back decades of hard fought civil rights protections.”