Maine’s Department of Education (DOE) issued a statement on Tuesday opposing President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order that officially acknowledges there are only two sexes and preserves women-only spaces from males.

“The Executive Order ‘Defending Women From Gender ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ applies to the Federal government/Federal government agencies only and does not inhibit the force of Maine law or locally-adopted school board policies,” said the DOE’s priority notice.

In addition to reminding local school boards that President Trump’s order applies only to federal institutions, the DOE argued that they are required to comply with the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA).

The MHRA prohibits discrimination based on a variety of factors, including the allegedly mutable gender identity and gender expression.

Trump’s order focuses on the negative effect of radical gender ideology on women by allowing men into women’s-only places, including prisons. In Maine, at least one convicted murderer has been placed into a women’s prison after transitioning, post-conviction, into a woman. Although there have been no reported cases of sexual assault in Maine’s new mixed-sex prisons, other jurisdictions that mix sexes in prisons have seen sexual assaults and even pregnancies.

“My Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” said Trump.

The order prevents prisoners from being housed based on gender identity rather than sex and stops the use of any federal funds for medical procedures “for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

Trump did not specifically mention schools in his order. However, in repealing all Biden-era orders and directives supporting gender ideology, it does repeal directives discussing its application in schools.

In addition to acknowledging the existence of only two sexes, male and female, the order requires that only biological sex, and not gender identity, be indicated on official documents such as driver’s licenses or passports.

It provides a biological definition of each, acknowledging that a person’s sex is a biological reality determined at the moment of conception, rather than at some undefined moment in the future based on feelings.

“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” says the order.

“‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell,” it continues.

Under Gov. Janet Mills’s administration, Maine has become one of the most extreme states in its support for gender ideology, with taxpayer-funded irreversible transgender procedures for minors and legal protections for doctors performing those procedures on minors from out of state.

Maine’s schools have become a subject of national attention for allowing males to compete in girls’ sports and doing nothing while a biologically male transgender-identifying student attacked a girl and left her with a concussion.