Suit: VA Schools Still Let Boys Use Girls’ Spaces, Violating Title IX

Virginia’s five most corrupt school districts are now the subject of a formal complaint at the U.S. Department of Education because of their gender ideology policies. The policies appear to violate both Title IX and President Donald Trump’s executive order ending indoctrination in the nation’s K-12 public schools.

The Trump administration recently reinstated its own 2020 Title IX regulations, protecting the civil rights of women and girls in school, and ended the Biden administration’s Title IX rewrite that put them at risk in schools every day. Trump also signed an executive order (Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling) that blocks federal funding for schools that promote a “social transition” for children or require staff to refer to students using “preferred pronouns” that don’t align with their sex.

Virginia is home to some of the nation’s most corrupt school districts, and at least two — Loudoun and Fairfax Counties — have become household names for their unbending support for gender and racial radicalism. Using those two directives from the Trump administration, America First Legal has targeted the Northern Virginia school districts of Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington, and Prince William Counties, as well as that of the City of Alexandria, requesting that the Education Department investigate them for violating the Trump administration’s actions.

“School districts in Northern Virginia have led the charge against science, reality, and the law by eliminating sex-based rights and rewriting the law to give preferential treatment to students who claim to be ‘transgender’ or ‘gender expansive,’” Ian Prior, AFL senior advisor, said in a press release. “If those school districts want to continue to enforce unlawful, unworkable, and insane policies, they should lose their federal funding. President Trump has made clear that this lawlessness must end, and these five school districts must either come into compliance with the law or face the consequences of their intransigence.”

All five school districts have bathroom and locker room policies that violate Title IX and the executive order, AFL argues, because they allow students to use restrooms based on a claimed “gender identity” rather than their actual sex — meaning boys can use girls’ restrooms and girls can be forced to undress in front of boys in locker rooms, so long as the boys claim to be girls.

If the school districts are found violative of Title IX, they are poised to lose federal funding. The districts are among the most populous in Virginia and are home to many government employees.

Arlington County requires that “access to facilities that correspond to a student’s gender identity … be available to all students,” which was an active policy, AFL notes, when “a male sex offender exposed his genitals to a 9-year-old [girl] in the girls’ locker room.” He “had been using the girls’ locker room for months,” claiming to identify as a female.

Some of the school districts, like Alexandria City, have policies that put the onus on the students who simply want to use their own restrooms without fear of having to run into someone of the opposite sex. The policy states that students uncomfortable with using the facilities with the opposite sex need to find their own “single user” facility, so long as they “minimize lost instructional time.”

Fairfax County’s policy, which governs the most populous county in the commonwealth, states that “[i]n no case shall a gender-expansive or transgender student be required to use a locker room or restroom that conflicts with the student’s gender identity or be limited to using only a private area, single-occupancy accommodation, or other single-use facility.”

Loudoun and Prince William Counties have similar policies, and Loudoun defines “gender identity” as “[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.”

Loudoun was home to perhaps the most notable story that came out of the 2020-2021 nationwide revelations on the evils of the education establishment. In May 2021, a Loudon County high school girl was violently sexually assaulted in the girls’ restroom by a boy wearing a skirt. The district tried to cover it up, and the girl’s father was arrested for speaking out, leading the Federal Bureau of Investigations to open domestic terrorism inquiries into parents who were concerned about their children in school.

“Leftist public school administrators and teachers have, in the name of divisive and radical racial and gender ideologies, abused American parents’ rights and catastrophically failed our children,” Reed D. Rubenstein, AFL senior vice president, said in a press release. “They have used our tax dollars to create a perverse echo chamber in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination; young men and women are even made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.”

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.