PORTLAND, Maine — The deadline has arrived for Maine officials to reach a resolution with the U.S. Education Department over a finding that the state violated antidiscrimination laws by allowing transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports.

The Education Department said in March that an investigation concluded the Maine Department of Education violated the federal Title IX law by allowing transgender girls to participate on girls’ teams. The investigation followed a public disagreement between Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills and President Donald Trump at a February meeting of governors.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a final warning on March 31 telling the state it needed to comply with the law in 10 business days or face enforcement from the U.S. Justice Department. That deadline arrived Friday.

Maine education officials have declined to comment on the investigation. Trump has said the state risks losing federal funding if it does not come into compliance.

“The Maine Department of Education’s indifference to its past, current, and future female athletes is astonishing. By refusing to comply with Title IX, MDOE allows — indeed, encourages — male competitors to threaten the safety of female athletes, wrongfully obtain girls’ hard-earned accolades, and deny females equal opportunity in educational activities to which they are guaranteed under Title IX,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Federal funding is critical to Maine schools. Maine got $358 million in federal funding for K-12 schools in 2021-22, or 10% of its budget, according to data from the Census. About 13% of that money went to Title I, 14% to special education and 20% to child nutrition programs such as school lunches.

Almost half of federal funds were simply marked as “other,” which likely points to the substantial COVID relief funds schools got that year. Prior to the pandemic, Maine got 6% of its funding from federal sources, almost $185 million in 2018-19.

The issue of school funding and transgender participation in sports in Maine began to bubble up when Mills and Trump sparred over the subject during the February meeting at the White House. During the meeting, Trump threatened to pull federal funding from Maine if the state did not comply with his executive order barring transgender athletes from sports.

Mills responded: “We’ll see you in court.”

Soon after, the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched investigations into the state.

Health and Human Services officials said in March that the Maine Department of Education, Maine Principals’ Association and a high school are each in violation of Title IX because of the participation of transgender athletes. The Health Department has already referred the issue to the Justice Department for enforcement in court.

The principals’ association and school district both said they would not comply with a proposed agreement to ban the athletes. The Maine education department declined to comment.

Maine Republicans, who are in the minority in both houses of the Legislature, have put pressure on state Democrats to resolve the investigations. House Republican Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, speaking during a news conference, said Mills has created a “hostage situation” that jeopardizes federal funding.

“The governor, and her administration, is holding Maine schools and Maine education under hostage,” Faulkingham said. “This standoff is not going to end well for the state of Maine and its education funding.”

LGBTQ+ rights groups in Maine have defended the state’s approach. “We’re not giving in, and we’re not giving up on our trans community,” EqualityMaine said in a social media post.

Federal authorities have also said they are investigating Maine due to claims school districts in the state violate federal law by withholding information about students’ gender transitioning from parents.

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Associated Press writer Sharon Lurye in New Orleans contributed to this report.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati will hear arguments Wednesday in a legal dispute that pits a suburban Ohio school district’s policy requiring use of students’ preferred pronouns against the free speech rights of classmates who believe there are only two genders.

The lawsuit brought by Parents Defending Education, a national Christian organization, against the Olentangy Local School District in 2023 has captured broad national attention from groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative Manhattan Institute. Ohio’s solicitor general has asked to participate in oral arguments on behalf of 22 U.S. states that have interests in the case.

A lower court rejected the group’s arguments that the policies violated students’ First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit affirmed that decision in July.

The full court will reconsider that decision in a rare en banc hearing Wednesday. Here’s what you need to know:

The lawsuit takes issue with overlapping district policies that prohibit the use of gender-related language that other students might deem insulting, dehumanizing, unwanted or offensive and call for the use of peers’ “preferred pronouns.”

The district’s electronic devices policy — which applies both on and off school time — prohibits transmitting “disruptive” material or material that could be seen as harassing or disparaging other students based on their gender identity or sexual orientation, among other categories.

A separate antidiscrimination policy prohibits students from engaging in “discriminatory language” during times when they’re under the school’s authority. That is defined as “verbal or written comments, jokes, and slurs that are derogatory towards an individual or group based on one or more of the following characteristics: race, color, national origin, sex (including sexual orientation and transgender identity), disability, age, religion, ancestry, or genetic information.”

The district’s code of conduct echoes many of the same themes a third time.

Parents Defending Education, founded in 2021 amid the culture wars over schools’ teachings on race, diversity and sexuality, argues that the policies compel students and parents who belong to their group to “affirm an idea that gender is fluid” in contradiction of their religious beliefs.

“These students have views that the District disfavors,” the group wrote in a court filing. “Specifically, they believe that people are either male or female, that biological sex is immutable, and that sex does not change based on someone’s internal feelings. Accordingly, they ‘d(o) not want to be forced to ‘affirm’ that a biologically female classmate is actually a male — or vice versa — or that a classmate is ’nonbinary’ and neither male nor female.”

The group argues that the policies unconstitutionally compel “viewpoint-based” speech by forcing students who believe in only two genders to use pronouns that suggest otherwise. They say that violates the First Amendment’s guarantees to free speech and similar protections contained in the 14th Amendment, particularly since students are subject to punishment for violating the policies.

Parents Defending Education further challenges the electronic devices policy for applying outside school hours and off school property. The ACLU has sided with the parents’ group on this point, arguing the district’s policies are overbroad.

Olentangy Local School District outside Columbus, one of the state’s largest districts, maintains the policies protect students against abuse and harassment and asserts that Parents Defending Education represents “Christian, cisgender” students “seeking dispensation under the free speech clause of the First Amendment to harass other students based on their gender identity.”

“They are not illegal immigrants subject to deportation. They are not gay soldiers under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. They’re not African Americans in the Jim Crow south. They’ve not been systematically oppressed,” the district’s lawyers told the lower court. “They’re members of the majority who want to — under the guise of the First Amendment — openly voice their opposition to an historically maligned minority group, transgendered people.”

Olentangy argues that Parents Defending Education has failed to provide evidence of injury — as the lawsuit was filed before disciplinary action had been brought against any student. The district also says that its policies leave open other options for students who don’t wish to use someone’s preferred pronouns. That includes calling the person by their first name, using a gender-neutral pronoun or simply not referring to them at all.

The availability of such options, an argument against the policies unconstitutionally compelling students to say certain things, played a role in the three-judge panel’s 2-1 ruling in favor of the district last summer.

NEW YORK — To billionaire Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the Department of Government Efficiency, Karen Ortiz may just be one of many faceless bureaucrats. But to some of her colleagues, she is giving a voice to those who feel they can’t speak out.

Ortiz is an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the federal agency in charge of enforcing U.S. workplace anti-discrimination laws that has undergone tumultuous change since President Donald Trump took office. Like millions of other federal employees, Ortiz opened an ominous email on Jan. 28 titled “Fork in the Road” giving them the option to resign from their positions as part of the government’s cost-cutting measures directed by Trump and carried out by DOGE under Musk, an unelected official.

Her alarm grew when her supervisor directed administrative judges in her New York district office to pause all their current LGBTQ+ cases and send them to Washington for further review in order to comply with Trump’s executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two “immutable” sexes — male and female.

Ortiz decried management’s lack of action in response to the directive, which she said was antithetical to the EEOC’s mission, and called upon some 185 colleagues in an email to “resist” complying with “illegal mandates.” But that email was “mysteriously” deleted, she said.

The next day, after yet another frustrating “Fork in the Road” update, Ortiz decided to go big, emailing the EEOC’s acting chair Andrea Lucas directly and copying more than 1,000 colleagues with the subject line, “A Spoon is Better than a Fork.” In it, Ortiz questioned Lucas’s fitness to serve as acting chair, “much less hold a license to practice law.”

“I know I take a great personal risk in sending out this message. But, at the end of the day, my actions align with what the EEOC was charged with doing under the law,” Ortiz wrote. “I will not compromise my ethics and my duty to uphold the law. I will not cower to bullying and intimidation.”

Ortiz is just one person, but her email represents a larger pushback against the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to federal agencies amid an environment of confusion, anger and chaos. It is also Ortiz’s way of taking a stand against the leadership of a civil rights agency that last month moved to dismiss seven of its own cases representing transgender workers, marking a major departure from its prior interpretation of the law.

Right after sending her mass email, Ortiz said she received a few supportive responses from colleagues — and one calling her unprofessional. Within an hour, though, the message disappeared and she lost her ability to send any further emails.

But it still made it onto the internet. The email was recirculated on Bluesky and it received more than 10,000 “upvotes” on Reddit after someone posted it with the comment, “Wow I wish I had that courage.”

“AN AMERICAN HERO,” one Reddit user deemed Ortiz, a sentiment that was seconded by more than 2,000 upvoters. “Who is this freedom fighter bringing on the fire?” wrote another.

The EEOC did not feel the same way. The agency revoked her email privileges for about a week and issued her a written reprimand for “discourteous conduct.”

Contacted by The AP, a spokesperson for the EEOC said: “We will refrain from commenting on internal communications and personnel matters. However, we would note that the agency has a long-standing policy prohibiting unauthorized all-employee emails, and all employees were reminded of that policy recently.”

A month later, Ortiz has no regrets.

“It was not really planned out, it was just from the heart,” the 53-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview, adding that partisan politics have nothing to do with her objections and that the public deserves the EEOC’s protection, including transgender workers. “This is how I feel and I’m not pulling any punches. And I will stand by what I wrote every day of the week, all day on Sunday.”

Ortiz said she never intended for her email to go beyond the EEOC, describing it as a “love letter” to her colleagues. But, she added, “I hope that it lights a fire under people.”

Ortiz said she has received “a ton” of support privately in the month since sending her email, including a thank-you letter from a California retiree telling her to “keep the faith.” Open support among her EEOC colleagues beyond Reddit and Bluesky, however, has proven more elusive.

“I think people are just really scared,” she said.

William Resh, a University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy professor who studies how administrative structure and political environments affect civil servants, weighed in on why federal workers may choose to say nothing even if they feel their mission is being undermined.

“We can talk pie in the sky, mission orientation and all these other things. But at the end of the day, people have a paycheck to bring home, and food to put on a table and a rent to pay,” Resh said.

The more immediate danger, he said, is the threat to one’s livelihood, or inviting a manager’s ire.

“And so then that’s where you get this kind of muted response on behalf of federal employees, that you don’t see a lot of people speaking out within these positions because they don’t want to lose their job,” Resh said. “Who would?”

Richard LeClear, a U.S. Air Force veteran and EEOC staffer who is retiring early at 64 to avoid serving under the Trump administration, said Ortiz’s email was “spot on,” but added that other colleagues who agreed with her may fear speaking out themselves.

“Retaliation is a very real thing,” LeClear said.

Ortiz, who has been a federal employee for 14 years and at the EEOC for six, said she isn’t naive about the potential fallout. She has hired attorneys, and maintains that her actions are protected whistleblower activity. As of Friday, she still had a job but she is not a lifetime appointee and is aware that her health care, pension and source of income could all be at risk.

Ortiz is nonetheless steadfast: “If they fire me, I’ll find another avenue to do this kind of work, and I’ll be okay. They will have to physically march me out of the office.”

Many of Ortiz’s colleagues have children to support and protect, which puts them in a more difficult position than her to speak out, Ortiz acknowledged. She said her legal education and American citizenship also put her in a position to be able to make change.

Her parents, who came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1950s with limited English skills, ingrained in her the value of standing up for others. Their firsthand experience with the Civil Rights Movement, and her own experience growing up in mostly white spaces in Garden City on Long Island, primed Ortiz to defend herself and others.

“It’s in my DNA,” she said. “I will use every shred of privilege that I have to lean into this.”

Ortiz received her undergraduate degree at Columbia University, and her law degree at Fordham University. She knew she wanted to become a judge ever since her high school mock trial as a Supreme Court justice.

Civil rights has been a throughline in her career, and Ortiz said she was “super excited” when she landed her job at the EEOC.

“This is how I wanted to finish up my career,” she said. “We’ll see if that happens.”

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CUMBERLAND, Md. — A Maryland court on Tuesday ordered a blogger known as Ziz who leads a cultlike group connected to six killings held without bail.

The blogger, Jack LaSota, 34, of Berkeley, California, was arrested Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 32, of Media, Pennsylvania, and Daniel Blank, 26, of Sacramento, California. They face charges including trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in a vehicle.

The Zizians have been tied to the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland near the Canadian border in January and five other killings in three states.

LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested in Frostburg, Maryland, on Sunday afternoon.

The judge in the case ordered LaSota held without bail citing concerns about her being a flight risk and a danger to public safety. Prosecutors said LaSota “appears to be the leader of an extremist group known as Zizians” that has been linked to killings.

The three were expected to appear remotely for a bail hearing Tuesday at Allegany District Court in Cumberland, Maryland, court officials said.

The Zizians have been tied to the death of a woman during an attack on a California landlord in November 2022, the landlord’s subsequent slaying in January, the December 2022 deaths of Zajko’s parents in Pennsylvania and a highway shootout last month in Vermont that left U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland and a car passenger dead.

A Frostburg resident told police he wanted three “suspicious” people off his property after they’d parked two box trucks there and asked to camp for a month, according to police documents.

They were dressed in black and two wore gun belts holding ammunition, according to police. Officers found a rifle in the back of one truck and a handgun on the front floorboard. Zajko, who refused to put her hands behind her back and was taken to the ground, also was carrying a handgun, police said.

Maland, 44, was killed in a Jan. 20 shootout following a traffic stop in Coventry, Vermont, a small town about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the Canadian border. Felix Bauckholt, a passenger in the car, also died, and the driver, Teresa Youngblut, has pleaded not guilty to federal firearms charges.

Officials have said the guns they were carrying were bought by a person of interest in the Dec. 31, 2022, deaths of Richard and Rita Zajko in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, and that Youngblut had been in close contact with a person of interest in a homicide in Vallejo, California.

Maximilian Snyder, who applied for a marriage license with Youngblut in November, is charged with the Jan. 17 stabbing death of Curtis Lind, a Vallejo landlord who had survived an earlier attack by members of the Zizian group and was set to testify against them.

Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, but Associated Press interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent.

Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings included topics such as radical veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence.

At the middle of it all is “Ziz,” the leader of the strange group whose members are sometimes called “Zizians” in online forums.

LaSota published a dark and sometimes violent blog under the name Ziz and, in one section, described her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”

LaSota, who used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman, railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

LaSota has not responded to emails from the AP in recent weeks, and her attorney Daniel McGarrigle declined to comment on whether she is connected to any of the deaths. She’s wanted for arrest in two states for missing court appearances.

McGarrigle would only confirm Monday that he has represented LaSota and wouldn’t confirm her arrest or any details of the latest case. Attempts to reach attorneys for Zajko and Blank were not successful.

Pennsylvania state police records describe Daniel Blank as Michelle Zajko’s housemate in Vermont. In January 2023, police investigating the shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents detained both LaSota and Blank at a hotel where Zajko was staying. Blank was not charged. LaSota was charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct.

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Associated Press writer Michael Casey in Boston contributed to this story.

Hospitals in Colorado, Virginia and the nation’s capital said Thursday they have paused gender-affirming care for young people as they evaluate President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at cutting federal support for such care.

Denver Health in Colorado has stopped providing gender-affirming surgeries for people under age 19, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday, in order to comply with the executive order and continue receiving federal funding. It is unclear whether the hospital will continue providing other gender-affirming care for youth, including hormone therapy and puberty blockers.

In Virginia, VCU Health and Children’s Hospital of Richmond said they have suspended gender-affirming medication and gender-affirming surgical procedures for those under 19 years old.

In Washington, D.C., Children’s National Hospital said the hospital had “paused prescriptions of puberty blockers and hormone therapy to comply with the directives while we assess the situation further.” The hospital already did not perform gender-affirming surgery on minors, a spokesperson said Thursday.

Trump’s order, signed Thursday, is part of a push to reverse Biden administration policies meant to protect transgender people and their care. It ordered agencies to take steps to makes sure that hospitals receiving federal research and education grants “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

Other hospitals told The Associated Press that their current practices would continue. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago said hospital officials are reviewing the order and “assessing any potential impact to the clinical services we offer to our patient families.”

“Our team will continue to advocate for access to medically necessary care, grounded in science and compassion for the patient-families we are so privileged to serve,” the statement said.

The language in Trump’s executive order — using words such as “maiming,” “sterilizing” and “mutilation” — contradicts what is typical for gender-affirming care in the United States. It also labels guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health as “junk science.”

WPATH said in a statement that restrictions and bans on “access to necessary medical care for transgender youth are harmful to patients and their families.”

Gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth isn’t common. A new study shows that fewer than 1 in 1,000 U.S. adolescents with commercial insurance received puberty blockers or hormones during a recent five-year period, and the bulk of gender-affirming surgeries are not performed on youth.

The Denver hospital said Trump’s order would affect the mental health of its transgender patients, and that they would continue to receive primary and behavioral health care.

“Denver Health is committed to and deeply concerned for the health and safety of our gender diverse patients under the age of 19,” the hospital’s statement said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has launched his second bid to oust all transgender troops from the military, and once again it will be headed to the courts to sort it out.

Although the new order will affect only a tiny fraction of America’s 2.1 million service members, it has taken on oversized importance to Trump and his administration, who see transgender forces as a sign the military is “woke” or not focused on training and winning wars.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, before he took the job, wrote in his book “War on Warriors” that “for the recruits, for the military, and primarily for the security of the country, transgender people should never be allowed to serve. It’s that simple.”

Trump’s order to push out transgender troops, issued late Monday night, was instantly condemned by an array of activist groups as exceptionally egregious and ultimately harmful to military readiness. They say transgender people have been serving successfully for years, including openly on and off for the past decade.

Here’s a look at what it all means and the confusing duel over the ban for the past decade.

Trump’s order essentially says that anyone who is diagnosed with gender dysphoria — the unease someone has when their assigned sex and gender identity don’t match — cannot serve in the military. It gives the defense secretary 60 days to update the medical standards for enlistment and re-enlistment to reflect that change. And it gives Hegseth 30 days to lay out how he plans to implement it all.

According to the order, “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.” It says the hormonal and surgical needs involved in taking on a different gender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”

It concludes that, “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

The order also zeroes in on the heady bathroom issue.

On his first day in office Trump issued an executive order that he said would “restore biological truth” to the federal government by eliminating the word “gender” and replacing it with “sex.” He said the federal government will only recognize people based on their sex at the time of conception based on their “reproductive cell.”

His latest order expands on that, saying the military will “neither allow males to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for females, nor allow females to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for males.”

The Pentagon has said in recent years that it is impossible to count the total number of transgender troops. The military services say there is no way to track them and that much information is limited due to medical privacy laws.

Estimates have hovered between 9,000 and 12,000. But it will be very difficult for officials to identify them, even as service members worry about the hunt to root them out.

“This casts an enormous shadow on people that are getting ready to go on a deployment for six months overseas or, you know, getting ready to go on a combat mission,” said Sasha Buchert, counsel for Lambda Legal. “This is going to be extremely disruptive. And they’re going to have to look over their shoulder in fear of when the next shoe will fall.”

Since transgender troops have been able to serve openly for a number of years, it’s possible their fellow unit members or commanders know who some of them are. That triggers worries about people identifying them in order to get them pushed out — and raises parallels to the Clinton administration’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which allowed gays to serve in the military as long as they didn’t “tell.”

In March 2018, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis released a memo with unprecedented details on the number of transgender forces and how many of them had sought mental health help or were planning to seek surgery.

It said, at that time, there were 8,980 service members who identified themselves as transgender, and 937 had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The report said data collected by the military health system revealed that 424 of those service members diagnosed had gotten treatment plans approved and for at least 36 of them those plans didn’t include “cross sex hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery.”

In 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter broached the idea of lifting the ban on transgender troops and allowing them to serve openly, which raised concerns among military leaders. He set up a study, and then about a year later, in June 2016, announced the ban was ended.

A year after that, just six months into his first presidential term, Trump suddenly announced via tweet he was not going to allow transgender people to serve in the military “in any capacity.” The tweets caught the Pentagon by surprise and plunged leaders into what became a roughly two-year struggle to hammer out the complex details of who would be affected by the ban and how it would work, even as legal challenges poured in.

By March 2019, as courts ruled against the ban, the Pentagon laid out a policy that allowed those currently serving to continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But it barred new enlistments of anyone with gender dysphoria who was taking hormones or had transitioned to another gender. And it said in the future those diagnosed with gender dysphoria must “serve in their birth gender” and were barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery.

Soon after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he overturned Trump’s ban and the Pentagon also announced it would cover transition medical expenses for troops.

The chiefs of all four military services told members of Congress in 2018 they were seeing few problems as transgender troops began serving openly.

The Navy chief at the time, Adm. John Richardson, said the Navy was dealing with the issue the same way it handled the integration of women sailors on submarines.

And the Marine commandant then, Gen. Robert Neller, said there were no unit cohesion or discipline problems. His only concern, he told a Senate committee, was that some commanders were saying they had to spend “a lot of time” with transgender people as they worked through medical requirements involving their transition to their preferred gender.

Sarah Klimm, a transgender Marine who served for 23 years, retired just as the end to the ban was announced in 2016, so was never able to serve openly.

”Trans military members that are out there right now are dropping bombs, pulling triggers, fixing all the weapons systems,” she said Tuesday. “And now you’re looking to keep them away.”

Klimm, who is now a policy analyst for Minority Veterans of America, said it’s an especially precarious time to remove thousands of service members as recruiting has been a struggle.

Emily Shilling, who has been openly transgender since 2019, is currently serving as a commander in the Navy with more than 19 years of service, including as a combat pilot who flew 60 missions in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“I just want to continue serving my country, using the skills this nation invested in me as a fighter pilot and leader,” she said, stressing that she was speaking in her personal capacity. “For nearly two decades, I’ve upheld the highest standards of excellence, leading teams in combat and peace. All I ask is the opportunity to keep using my training and experience to serve this country with honor, courage and dedication.”

___ Associated Press writer Tara Copp contributed to this report.

TOPEKA, Kan. — Republicans and Democrats in Kansas agree that concerns about the economy drove voters to support President Donald Trump by a 16% margin.

They also know that ads from Trump and others targeting transgender rights resonated with voters. So while Kansas Republicans say property tax cuts are their top priority, they also are pushing to ban gender-affirming care for young people, including puberty blockers, hormones and, even though they are rare for minors, surgeries. They say that, too, resonates strongly with voters.

“It carries so much more emotional weight,” said Republican state Rep. Ron Bryce, a doctor from southeastern Kansas. “We’re talking about children and our future.”

As lawmakers have gone into session in many states, Republicans are broadly emboldened by GOP electoral successes to continue pushing state-level bills to curtail transgender rights.

As was the case in 2023 and 2024, dozens of bills are pending in mostly red-state legislatures aimed at issues such as which bathroom transgender people can use in public buildings, whether transgender people can use their gender identity on their driver’s licenses and whether transgender girls can play on girls sports teams. In Texas alone, Republicans have filed more than 30 measures.

Democrats are reckoning with voter backlash while not abandoning what they see as a civil rights issue.

Kansas state Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, said it’s hard to conclude that Kansas voters favor transgender rights after Republicans picked up three state House seats and two state Senate seats.

Republicans in the state think they’ll be able to ban gender-affirming care for young people this year after previously failing because the added Republican members will allow them to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

“Transgender people are going to be facing discrimination at the national level for four years,” Carmichael said Tuesday. “I’m sure that some of my colleagues in the Kansas Legislature will try to find a way to one-up even what Donald Trump is doing.”

Trump, who made anti-transgender themes central to his campaign, signed executive orders on his first day in office Monday declaring that the federal government would recognize only two sexes: male and female.

Federal prisons and shelters for migrants and rape survivors will be segregated by sex as defined by the order, and federal taxpayer money will not be able to be used to fund “transition services,” which would appear to cover people incarcerated in federal prisons.

In the U.S., about 300,000 youths ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, are transgender, according to estimates by the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ research center at the UCLA School of Law. Among adults, the figure is 0.5%, for 1.3 million transgender Americans who are 18 or older.

At the state level, legislators anticipate a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bans on gender-affirming care are constitutional. The court heard arguments in December on a Tennessee law that prohibits gender-affirming care for minors. The justices appeared likely to uphold the law, though a ruling isn’t expected until the summer.

About half of voters in the 2024 election said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, while about 2 in 10 said it’s been about right, and a similar share said it hasn’t gone far enough, according to AP VoteCast.

Voters were split on at least one specific proposal. AP VoteCast found that slightly more than half of voters opposed laws that ban gender-affirming medical treatment, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for transgender minors, while a little under half were in favor.

At least 26 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for people under 18.

Harleigh Walker, a transgender 17-year-old high school senior in Alabama where the care is banned, said it’s astounding that states are considering legislation that harms constituents like her. She said she’s likely to leave the South for college, and her family is also considering moving.

“We’re not hurting anyone,” Walker said in a telephone interview. “Our existence and our right to healthcare, bathroom use, et cetera, it’s not hurting anyone.”

Every major U.S. medical group, including the American Medical Association, has opposed the bans and said gender-affirming treatments can be medically necessary and are supported by evidence. Doctors, parents and young people have said such care reduces depression and suicidal thoughts in transgender youths.

Conservatives nonetheless often describe the care as potentially harmful. Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins said lawmakers are trying to protect young people.

“Children under the age of 18 are not equipped with the knowledge or maturity to make a decision that permanently affects the rest of their lives,” he said in a newsletter earlier this month.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates fear the next step is restrictions on care for adults. Florida is the only state that has done that, through there have been proposals in at least two other states.

Mo Jenkins, a 25-year-old transgender woman who ran unsuccessfully for a Texas House seat in Houston last year, described the possibility as terrifying. Her state banned gender-affirming care for minors in 2023.

“It was never going to stop with children,” she said.

The discussions among Democrats in red or swing states reflect the memory of Trump ads that blasted their presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, as being “for they/them” while “President Trump is for you.”

Democratic Kansas state Sen. Cindy Holscher focused her reelection campaign in affluent Kansas City suburbs on education and taxes, capturing 61% of the vote.

“Democrats have a tendency to want to lean on those social issues, but they aren’t necessarily winning issues,” she said.

Holscher, Carmichael and other Democrats say they will still oppose measures restricting transgender rights.

“Civil rights are in the DNA of Democrats,” said Joan Wagnon, a former Kansas Democratic Party chair, state lawmaker and Topeka mayor.

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DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Lathan reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writer Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed to this report.

Republican efforts to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from numbers used to divvy up congressional seats among states have begun anew, with four Republican state attorneys general suing to alter the once-a-decade head count even before President Donald Trump’s second term in office began Monday.

Trump joined in the battle immediately upon returning to office, signing an executive order on Monday that rescinded a Biden administration order and signaled the possibility of a push by his new administration to change the 2030 census. Those efforts may get a boost from the GOP-controlled Congress, where Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards from North Carolina earlier this month re-introduced legislation that would put a citizenship question on the census form.

During his first term, Trump signed an order that would have excluded people in the U.S. illegally from being included in the 2020 census numbers used to allot congressional seats and Electoral College votes to each state. The GOP president also mandated in a second order the collection of citizenship data through administrative records. A Republican redistricting expert had written that using citizen voting-age population instead of the total population for the purpose of redrawing congressional and legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

Trump issued the memos after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his earlier attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire. The high court said the administration’s justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”

Both Trump orders were rescinded when President Joe Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, before the 2020 census figures were released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation’s largest statistical agency.

“I think it’s an open question about how much energy the administration and Congress will try to bend the statistical system to its will,” historian Margo Anderson said about Trump’s second term. “Not because they wouldn’t like to, but because there are other parts of the national government that they are more interested in.”

The Fourteenth Amendment says that “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, the process of allocating congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states based on population. The numbers also guide the distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal dollars to the states for roads, health care and other programs.

The lawsuit filed Friday by the GOP attorneys general of Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio and West Virginia seeks to exclude people in the country illegally or temporarily from the numbers used to apportion congressional seats. It claims that Ohio and West Virginia each unfairly lost a congressional seat and an electoral vote after the 2020 census because people in the U.S. illegally were included, and that each of the four states stands to lose a congressional seat and electoral vote after the 2030 census if that doesn’t change.

Projections released last month by Election Data Services don’t show those four states losing seats after the 2030 census. The projections instead say California, New York and Illinois — states with Democratic majorities — are likely to lose the most seats and electoral votes.

The Census Bureau on Tuesday didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Opponents of the citizenship question on the 2020 census said it discouraged participation by immigrants and residents who were in the country illegally, resulting in inaccurate figures. A Census Bureau simulation released in 2023 indicated that a significant number of noncitizens were missed in the count, which took place during the last year of the first Trump administration and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Demographers and researchers expect the second Trump administration to change or reverse recent actions by the Biden administration related to U.S. statistical agencies. They include combining into a single question race and ethnicity questions that previously were asked separately on forms and adding a Middle Eastern and North African category.

Many experts also expect planned questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on the most comprehensive survey of American life to be on the chopping block. Some have concerns that Trump will politicize the Census Bureau with large numbers of political appointees, with little experience, as happened during his first term. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy guidebook for a Republican presidential administration advocated putting “committed political appointees and like-minded career employees” in bureau positions so they could “execute a conservative agenda.”

“They could easily put in the same type of idiots they put in last time for political purposes,” said Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, who is an expert on the census. “I would assume that he will do what he tried to do before.”

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Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform X: @MikeSchneiderAP.

PARIS — French Appeal Court prosecutors said an American man accused of sexually assaulting a Pennsylvania college student in 2013 and later sending her a Facebook message that said, “So I raped you,” was being extradited Thursday to the United States.

The Appeal Court prosecutors’ office in Metz, in northeastern France, said Ian Cleary was handed over to U.S. authorities at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

Cleary, 31, of Saratoga, California, was detained in April in Metz after a three-year search. He has been held in custody pending extradition proceedings since his arrest. The Appeal Court in Metz ruled in July that he could be extradited.

Cleary had been the subject of an international search since authorities in Pennsylvania issued a 2021 felony warrant in the case weeks after an Associated Press story detailed the reluctance of local prosecutors to pursue campus sex crimes.

The arrest warrant accuses Cleary of stalking an 18-year-old Gettysburg College student at a party in 2013, sneaking into her dorm and sexually assaulting her while she texted friends for help. He was a 20-year-old Gettysburg student at the time, but didn’t return to campus.

The accuser, Shannon Keeler, had a rape exam done the same day. She gathered witnesses and evidence and spent years urging officials to file charges. She went to authorities again in 2021 after discovering the Facebook messages that seemed to come from Cleary’s account.

“So I raped you,” the sender wrote in a string of messages.

“I’ll never do it to anyone ever again.”

“I need to hear your voice.”

“I’ll pray for you.”

According to the June 2021 warrant, police verified that the Facebook account used to send the messages belonged to Cleary.

The AP doesn’t typically identify sexual assault victims without their permission, which Keeler has granted.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s Title IX rules expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students have been struck down nationwide after a federal judge in Kentucky found they overstepped the president’s authority.

In a decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves scrapped the entire 1,500-page regulation after deciding it was “fatally” tainted by legal shortcomings. The rule had already been halted in 26 states after a wave of legal challenges by Republican states.

President-elect Donald Trump previously promised to end the rules “on day one” and made anti-transgender themes a centerpiece of his campaign.

The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti called it a rejection of the Biden administration’s “relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology.”

“Because the Biden rule is vacated altogether, President Trump will be free to take a fresh look at our Title IX regulations when he returns to office,” Skrmetti said in a statement.

The Education Department did not immediately comment on the decision.

The Biden administration ignited controversy when it finalized the new rules last year. The regulation expanded Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding discrimination based on sex in education, to also prevent discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. It also widened the definition of harassment to include a broader range of misconduct.

Civil rights advocates hailed it as a victory, saying it gave LGBTQ+ students new recourse against discrimination. But it drew outrage from conservatives who said it could be used to protect transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

The rule didn’t explicitly address athletics and mostly detailed how schools and colleges were required to respond to cases of discrimination and sexual assault. A separate proposal dealing with transgender athletes in sports was put on the back-burner and later revoked after it became a focal point of Trump’s campaign.

In his decision, Reeves found the Education Department overstepped its authority by expanding the scope of Title IX.

There’s nothing in the 1972 law suggesting that it should cover any more than it has since Congress created it, Reeves wrote. He called it an “attempt to bypass the legislative process and completely transform Title IX.”

The judge also found that it violated free speech rights by requiring teachers to use pronouns aligning with a student’s gender identity.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves wrote.

Rather than carve out certain aspects of the rule, Reeves decided it was best to toss the regulation in its entirety and revert to a previous interpretation of Title IX. He said his decision will “simply ‘cause a return to the status quo’ that existed for more than 50 years prior to its effective date.”

Among the biggest critics of the rule was Betsy DeVos, former education secretary during Trump’s first term. On the social media site X, she wrote that the “radical, unfair, illegal, and absurd Biden Title IX re-write is GONE.”

Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said Biden’s rule “betrayed the original intent of Title IX by removing longstanding protections that ensured fairness for women and girls.”

“With President Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, we will ensure women and girls have every opportunity to succeed on the field and in the classroom,” Cassidy said in a statement.

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