Maine has found itself the surprising center of the nation’s debate over — and the Trump administration’s crusade against — transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

That position leaves the state, one of the smallest and least populous, vulnerable to weighty financial and social consequences as it takes on President Trump

It started with four words in February. “See you in court,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) told Trump at the White House in an exchange that followed public threats to her state’s funding.

The president pressed Mills to comply with his executive order to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, which she has argued violates a Maine anti-discrimination law. Trump says the state is violating Title IX, the federal civil rights law against sex discrimination, by allowing trans girls to compete.

Mills refused, and the backlash was swift.

The Education Department announced the same day an investigation into Maine over alleged Title IX violations. The Department of Health and Human Services, which recently began probing states and schools with transgender athletes, launched its own inquiry the following day.

Then came a series of actions against the state with less of a connection to the issue at hand. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration abruptly discontinued — and later agreed to renegotiate — funding for the Maine Sea Grant program, which bolsters the state’s coastal economy; the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funds for the state that a judge later ordered it to restore; Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek ordered two data collection contracts with Maine terminated; the Justice Department cut funding for several of the state corrections department’s grant programs.

“Evidence would support a conclusion that Maine is being treated disproportionately more harsh than other states when it comes to this direction of federal attention,” state Attorney General Aaron Frey (D) said in a recent interview.

Federal administration officials have, on several occasions,........

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