Loudoun and four other districts violated Title IX by allowing transgender students to access school facilities based on ‘subjective’ gender identity, the Office for Civil Rights said
The Loudoun County, Va., school board voted Tuesday to keep its transgender policies, even after the Education Department warned that the district and four others could face legal punishment and lose federal funding for violating Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination.
The board “voted to maintain its policies allowing transgender students to use facilities that match their gender identity,” defying the Education Department’s order to drop the policies, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
President Donald Trump’s Education Department began investigating the Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William school districts following a complaint by conservative group America First Legal. Last month, the department’s Office for Civil Rights concluded that the five northern Virginia districts violate Title IX by allowing transgender students to “access intimate, sex-segregated facilities based on the students’ subjective ‘gender identity.'”
The Office for Civil Rights ordered the districts to drop the gender identity policies and “adopt biology-based definitions” of sex or “risk imminent enforcement action including referral to the U.S. Department of Justice.” The districts could also lose federal funding, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said last month in an interview with WJLA-TV.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has issued a series of executive orders rolling back the Biden administration’s transgender policies, including banning sex-change surgeries for minors, prohibiting transgender individuals from serving in the military, and barred biological men from participating in women’s sports. He has also ordered federal agencies to define biological sex strictly as male or female.
Loudoun County has faced scrutiny over its transgender policies before. In 2021, the district was widely criticized for its response to two sexual assaults at two different schools by a male student who reportedly identified as “gender-fluid.” The district’s former superintendent was convicted in the case, but a judge later overturned the verdict, and the Virginia attorney general’s office dropped charges.
Fairfax County’s school board, meanwhile, in June 2022 approved guidelines to suspend students from fourth grade on up for “misgendering” peers who identify as transgender. Weeks later, the district prohibited teachers and administrators from telling parents when students as young as kindergarten-age claim to have “switched genders” at school.
“These five Virginia school districts have been trampling on the rights of students in the service of an extreme political ideology,” acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor said last month. “The Trump Administration will not sacrifice the safety, dignity, and innocence of America’s young women and girls at the altar of an anti-scientific illiberalism.”
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