Janet Mills, the governor of my family’s home state of Maine, and governor Kathy Hochul, who leads my adopted home state of New York, are both showing resolve in the face of Trump’s attempts to meddle with state laws through extralegal coercion. I feel grimly proud of this personally resonant parallel, and I join both governors in standing up to a federal government that wasted no time in implementing a stance of bullying gangsterism to rule the nation.

Mills rebuffed Trump literally to his face last month, telling him coolly that Maine would continue to follow its own laws rather than dance for presidential whims about the presence of transgender athletes in schools. Around the same time, after Trump announced that New York would end the Manhattan congestion pricing enforcement that it had begun only in January, Hochul published a statement saying, essentially: Sorry, who are you?

I happen to hold no strong opinion on one these issues, and very strong feelings about the other. I understand the popularity of both policies to be shaky with with the larger public, and I expect that the Trump administration hopes that this gives them more leverage to use these policies as cudgels, in order to make examples out of two uppity states. But the policies’ popularity, or even the policies’ content, barely matters here. If the federal government wants to challenge a state’s laws, there are well-defined legal routes to do that. When Hochul and Mills say “See you in court”, they mean it literally. Trying to strong-arm a state government into compliant submission through targeted federal harassment of the state’s institutions and citizens is not how America is supposed to work.

The governors’ resistance will cost both states dearly. Already, Maine is getting slammed with federal punishment from multiple directions. As ProPublica reports, there are now more federal agencies “investigating” and penalizing the state then there are transgender school athletes in the state. (That number being: two.) I woke up this morning to the disheartening news that my alma mater, the University of Maine, has lost millions in federal funding over this issue, which mirrors New York’s Columbia University getting similarly hit last week. These aren’t just attacks on the two states; they harm the whole nation, and even humanity as a whole, threatening to slow the advancement of science for years to come. The Trump administration doesn’t care, of course: it’s a price they’re enthusiastically willing to pay if they think it will make a perceived mouthy subordinate cry uncle.

I have hope that both governors—and most of their constituents—realize that giving into the president’s demands would not alleviate these pains, but merely embolden the bully into making ever-greater demands. There’s no avoiding the pain of the years ahead, but we can choose to hold fast to our virtues and principles, at every level, individual and state. The villains that have taken over the federal apparatus can and will continue to hurt us, but we can stand strong to limit the damage they can wreak. My governors give me strength in the example that they set.