5 VA School Districts Investigated For OK’ing Boys In Girls’ Spaces

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into five Virginia school districts that allow boys to use girls’ facilities like restrooms and locker rooms, moving one step closer to revoking their federal funding.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed to America First Legal (AFL) that it is investigating Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington, and Prince William Counties, as well as the City of Alexandria, for violating allegedly Title IX civil rights law meant to protect women and girls at school. AFL filed a formal complaint about the far-left Washington, D.C., suburb school districts in early February.

“Executive Order 14190 reaffirms the fact that our civil rights laws prohibit Federal taxpayer funds … [from] directly or indirectly support[ing] or subsidiz[ing] Title IX violations, including the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology,” Reed D. Rubinstein, AFL senior vice president, said in a press release. “The leftists who run northern Virginia’s schools act as if they are above the law, with the power to indoctrinate children to view their parents and their biological reality as enemies to be blamed in violation of Title IX and lawful Presidential Orders. However, Federal civil rights laws apply even in northern Virginia, and it seems a reckoning is coming.”

Along with Title IX, the complaint cited an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 29 called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Following that order, the Department of Education officially reinstated the first Trump administration’s 2020 regulations to protect girls in school. That move revoked the Biden administration’s attempted overhaul of Title IX, which put girls in school at risk every day by essentially mandating districts allow boys to use their facilities so long as they claimed to be girls.

The school districts in Northern Virginia, which serve some of the largest populations of students in the commonwealth, are notoriously defiant and completely consumed by gender theory, critical race theory, and a dedication to conducting far-left social and academic experimentation on children. If the Department of Education finds them violative of Title IX and they continue to be defiant, the districts are poised to lose federal funding.

“Each of these school districts has spent years bowing to the altar of transgender ideology while ignoring the law, common sense, and the concerns of its students and their parents,” Ian Prior, AFL senior advisor, said. “A male student in these school districts can wake up, claim to be ‘gender expansive or transgender,’ and then have a pass to use female locker rooms and restrooms. If the female students are uncomfortable sharing those locker rooms and restrooms with that male student, it is the female students who must make alternative arrangements. That is sex discrimination.”

As the AFL complaint details, each school district has policies that require schools to allow students to use facilities that would typically (and rightly) be sex-segregated so long as they say they have the “gender identity” of the opposite sex. Some of the policies actually make it the responsibility of the students who are uncomfortable with having the “gender expansive” students use their facilities to find different accommodations.

The definitions of “gender identity” are, at best, flimsy, with Loudoun County stating it means “[a] person’s internal sense of their own identity as a boy/man, girl/woman, another gender, no gender, or outside the male/female binary. Gender identity is an innate part of a person’s identity and can be the same or different from the sex they were assigned at birth.”

AFL’s complaint notes that it is exactly these policies that allowed a male sex offender, who claimed to identify as a female, to expose his genitals to a 9-year-old girl in the girls’ locker room.

“We are grateful that President Trump and the Department of Education are so committed to taking action and investigating these radical and lawless school districts that would rather deny biology than teach it,” Prior said. “If these school districts had any common sense, they’d end their trip to fantasyland and return to earth. If they don’t, they should absolutely lose their federal funding.”

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.