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Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2025 11:00 am
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has ordered five school districts in Northern Virginia to immediately end their trans-inclusive policies that allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identities.
ED claimed the districts – Alexandria City Public Schools, Arlington Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools, and Prince William County Public Schools – were in violation of Title IX and guilty of discrimination on the basis of sex.
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The current administration has reversed President Joe Biden’s interpretation of Title IX, which found the statute’s prohibition on discrimination “on the basis of sex” as including anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. The rules rely on the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that sex-based discrimination necessarily covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
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The ED said its investigation into the Virginia districts was due to complaints alleging “that students in the Divisions avoid using school restrooms whenever possible because of the schools’ policies, and that female students have witnessed male students inappropriately touching other students and watching female students change in a female locker room.”
The right has latched on to the completely unfounded argument that trans inclusion puts cis women in danger. In reality, research has shown no evidence that allowing trans women access to single-sex spaces like bathrooms poses a safety risk to cisgender women.
In fact, forcing trans people to use facilities that do not align with their gender identity can result in “high rates of harassment and violence against transgender people as well as cisgender people, particularly women who do not conform to traditional ideas of femininity,” according to the Movement Advancement Project. A 2021 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute found that trans people are four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violent crime.
Nevertheless, ED has ordered the schools to rescind their trans-inclusive policies within 10 days and to “adopt biology-based definition of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ in all practices and policies relating to Title IX.”
“Although this type of behavior was tolerated by the previous Administration, it’s time for Northern Virginia’s experiment with radical gender ideology and unlawful discrimination to come to an end,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor in a statement.
He added that the districts “have been trampling on the rights of students in the service of an extreme political ideology” and said the administration “will not sacrifice the safety, dignity, and innocence of America’s young women and girls at the altar of an anti-scientific illiberalism.”
The press release also used the Supreme Court’s anti-trans decision in United States v. Skrmetti to justify its interpretation of Title IX. The decision allowed Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for minors to remain in effect.
“In so holding, the Supreme Court acknowledged that a person’s identification as ‘transgender’ is distinct from a person’s ‘biological sex,'” the press release stated, concluding that since Title IX bans discrimination on the basis of sex, it must also ban trans people from using the bathrooms in which they feel most comfortable.
Anti-LGBTQ+ Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) celebrated the results of the ED investigation. “These school divisions have been violating federal law, deliberately neglecting their responsibility to protect students’ safety, privacy and dignity, and ignoring parents’ rights,” he said in a statement.
“They got away with this behavior because the Biden Administration backed them up. Commonsense is back.”
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