The public school district in Virginia, which suspended boys who protested the presence of a girl in the boys’ locker room, is not backing down.
In August, Loudoun County Public Schools, in Virginia, suspended two high school boys for allegedly discriminating against a transgender-identifying female classmate. The students involved attend Stone Bridge High School. The girl reported the male students after she recorded them in the boys’ locker room discussing the presence of a girl in their space. The district responded by charging the boys with a Title IX violation and issuing the suspension.
According to a new response filed by LCPS, the district’s first extensive statement defending its decision, the female student accused the boys of “harassing him for using the boys’ locker room and referring to Complainant as ‘it’ and ‘girl-boy.’” (In its filing, LCPS refers to the transgender-identifying female student exclusively with male pronouns.)
In a filing submitted after the boys filed a federal lawsuit against the district, LCPS detailed its Title IX investigation.
LCPS interviewed 19 students and five staff members during the investigation, the district said, and allowed “three independent decisionmakers” to review the charges. “Decisionmakers” found the boys guilty of subjecting the girl to a “hostile environment [of] sexual harassment and discrimination based on sex, in violation of School Board Policy 8035,” the controversial policy that LCPS implemented years ago, which allows students to use whichever bathrooms or locker rooms correspond to their professed gender identity instead of their biological sex. The boys, LCPS continued in the filing, made comments “in an effort to harass and embarrass” the girl.
On Friday, Judge Leonie M. Brinkman of the Eastern District of Virginia granted the boys a preliminary injunction, which requires LCPS to delay the ten-day suspension it originally handed down to them. The court also, however, found “significant weaknesses” in the plaintiffs’ case and asked the boys’ families to deposit a $125,000 bond by this week “to ensure that if defendant prevails on dispositive pre-trial motions, it can recover from that bond its attorney’s fees.”
The plaintiffs say that the speech arose from their sincerely held religious beliefs — that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. State Attorney General Jason Miyares was confident in a brief filed to the court that the boys “are likely to succeed on their religious discrimination and free speech claims, as the School Board’s actions constitute textbook violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also found LCPS in violation of Title IX for suspending the boys.
LCPS’s case rests on the claim that high school boys created a hostile environment for a female student. The irony in that belief, of course, is that LCPS implemented the policy allowing the female to be in the boys’ locker room in the first place.
In the video the girl submitted to the school district, the boys are heard saying:
“Is there a girl in here?”
“There’s a girl.”
“Why is there a girl?”
“Why is there a girl?”
“I’m so uncomfortable there’s a girl.”
“That’s a female bro get out of here.”
LCPS called this speech “open, loud, and repeated” harassment “in an attempt to intimidate and humiliate” the girl. LCPS also accused the boys of “interfering with the rights” of the girl.
Essentially, LCPS allowed a girl to use the boys’ locker room and expected teenage boys to accept it. The district continues to deny that its trans policy — not the students who don’t want to share changing spaces with members of the opposite sex — is the problem.
Stone Bridge High School is the site of another gender-ideology-related scandal. In 2021, a skirt-wearing boy sexually assaulted a girl in a Stone Bridge women’s bathroom. The case spurred a political discussion about parental rights and trans ideology — a discussion that helped Governor Glenn Youngkin win his election.
Authorities say that the boy in the 2021 bathroom assault did not identify as transgender or gender fluid. But parents across the state still saw what trans bathroom policies could result in: girls and boys forced to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex, regardless of their discomfort or concerns about safety.