While the massive MAGA wave that swept the country on November 5th didn’t exactly wash over Maine, it certainly did have a discernible impact here.

The Trump Bump was churning just below the surface in state legislative races, where Democrats suffered a net loss of 5 seats in the House and 2 in the Senate. Historically, Democrats in Maine almost always pick up seats in a Presidential election year, but not in 2016, 2020, or 2024, when the anti-establishment populist Donald Trump was at the top of the ballot.

In fact, the Democrat majority in the Maine House of Representatives is thinner today than at any time since the Tea Party wave of 2010 swept Paul LePage into the Blaine House and gave Republicans a majority in the House for the first time since the 1970s.

So how will the majority party govern with such a slim margin: 76 Ds, 73 Rs, and 2 independents? The word from the Statehouse is that it will be business as usual for Democrats.

In his acceptance speech on December 4th, newly-reelected Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, laid out his agenda and offered his Republican colleagues an olive branch of sorts. Fecteau began by promising to work across the aisle to find common ground on issues such as the high cost of living, the lack of affordable housing, and blah blah blah. Predictably, he went on to push for dumping more money into Maine’s failing and dysfunctional government-run K-12 schools.

But I digress.

After his perfunctory and insincere nod to bipartisanship, Fecteau got down to business, sternly warning his colleagues that there will be no compromise on “civil rights, fundamental freedoms, and basic dignity.”

Translation: Maine Democrats will not retreat from the aggressive cultural warfare they are waging against the dreaded nuclear family, nor will they recant their new state religion, Transgender Supremacy. Trans cultists require that unbelievers change their ways, adjust their lives, nod their heads, and give up their privacy rights to accommodate the demands of people who suffer from the mental disorder known as gender dysphoria.

In 2019, Fecteau sponsored the LGBTQ-inspired ban on so-called “conversion therapy.” Fecteau’s gag order targets any therapist or doctor who counsels a gender-confused minor child to steer clear of puberty blockers and genital mutilation. Licensed counselors will have to keep their professional opinions to themselves if they are even mildly skeptical of the notion that an 8-year-old or a 12-year-old is capable of making informed decisions about transgender issues.

Penalties are severe. Violators are subject to being stripped of their professional licenses by the Nanny State Thought Police.

To hell with the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the Hippocratic Oath, and biological reality. Thus saith the Rainbow Mafia.

Enactment of Fecteau’s gag order in the spring of 2019 paved the way for legislation that was enacted just a few months later, ironically titled, An Act To Clarify Various Provisions of the Maine Human Rights Act. That 11-page long monstrosity clarified nothing, but it did include a redefinition of “gender identity” that insults the intelligence of anyone with an IQ above room temperature.

Here it is:

“Gender identity” means the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

That’s not just a circular definition, it’s a circular definition on steroids, repeating the term being defined not just once, but twice. This vague, imprecise, incoherent word salad would earn a failing grade in any middle-school English class, even in a Maine public school.

The amendment’s “gender identity” definition is akin to defining “institutional racism” as racism that’s institutional.

What’s more, the phrase about sex being assigned at birth has no basis whatsoever in reality. That verbiage is a crackpot, science-denying delusion lifted from the transgender cult’s catechism and incorporated into Maine statutes.

Think of the new definition as a giant middle-finger salute from the First Church of Transgender Supremacy and its cult followers in the Maine Legislature. Here’s the roll-call vote on the amendment.

In 2021, along came another proposed amendment to the MHRA, this one sponsored by Sen. Craig Hickman of Winthrop. Titled, “An Act To Improve Consistency in Terminology and within the Maine Human Rights Act,” the 13-page amendment provides legal protection for men who breast-feed in public, replacing the historically and biologically sound term “mother” with “person”:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, a mother person may breast-feed her that person’s baby in any location, public or private, where the mother person is otherwise authorized to be.” (see page 11 of the bill)

Make no mistake: when Speaker Fecteau exclaimed that Democrats will not compromise on civil rights, he was talking about the statutes cited above.

The problem for Speaker Fecteau is the seismic shift triggered by the MAGA millions on November 5th. Whether he likes it or not, the trans agenda is dead-in-the-water unsustainable, even in blue states like Maine.

In addition to weakening the Democrats’ control of the legislative process in Augusta, the election outcome hastened the demise of the Fake News industry, which will not be able to prop up the crumbling trans empire much longer.

Transgenderism is one of those ideas that’s so absurd only an intellectual can believe it. No ordinary person could be such a fool.

To the advantage of cultural conservatives, transgender ideology will remain a wedge issue so potent that not even a herd of rampaging RINOs with Trump Derangement Syndrome will be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the next couple of election cycles. We will nevertheless have to keep an eye out for squishy Republican politicians mucking up the works.

I’m confident that someday in the not-too-distant future, we will look back on “gender-affirming care” (sex-change surgery) the same way we look at lobotomies: as a ghastly, barbaric medical experiment on innocent victims, often without their informed consent.

Lobotomies were once celebrated by the medical establishment (and the Kennedy family) as a breakthrough in the treatment of depression. Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz is credited with inventing the procedure, and won the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his work.

More than 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the US between 1949 and 1952, most of them on women. The surgeon would drill a hole into each side of the skull and use instruments to sever the nerve fibers connecting the frontal lobe to other parts of the brain.

Side effects included seizures, brain infections, dementia, epilepsy, incontinence, obesity, and death.

The credibility of the medical “experts” dissolved within a few years as the severe and often irreversible side effects of the surgery became evident.

Cranial mutilation was never a good idea, no matter how many experts touted the surgery as a medical breakthrough.

Seven decades later, in the wake of November 5th, I sense an acceleration in the tide of public opinion turning against the dangerous and demented trans cultists.

Going forward, there will be hell to pay for those who profited from the scourge of chemical castration and genital mutilation.

To read this post on The Maine Wire, click here.

Lawrence Lockman of Bradley served four terms in the Maine House of Representatives, from 2012 to 2020. He is Co-founder and President of the conservative non-profit Maine First Project.