So-called gender-inclusive policies always seem to exclude from their considerations the most vulnerable.

Arlington Public Schools’ “gender-inclusive” policies allowed a male sex offender to expose himself in a women’s locker room at a district-owned pool. Last week, Arlington mother Jen McDougal told National Review about her encounter with the man: After swim practice, McDougal and her nine-year-old daughter walked into the locker room, where a man stood with his exposed penis. “I can’t stop seeing it,” her daughter told McDougal when the pair left the locker room.

The man, Richard Kenneth Cox, is a registered sex offender who was allowed access into the room because he identified as a woman.

When McDougal and her nine-year-old walked into the locker room and saw Cox, they, like the other women and girls in the room, didn’t know he was a registered sex offender. They just knew that a grown man with an exposed penis was standing in the middle of where their daughters, age nine and younger, were changing.

In response to community and media pressure (local reporter Nick Minock provides the details), on Monday the school district released a statement about its “updated pool entry procedures.” The list of procedures:

1. All members of school-based pool facilities and regular visitors are asked to take a photo upon arrival to sign in to the pool’s member management system and will need to use this system moving forward to check-in securely to the pool facilities.

2. Drop-in visitors MUST show ID and will be checked on the APS Raptor Visitor Management System, which checks all visitors against the sex offender database prior to entry.

3. During Drop-In or Free Swim, senior adults and/or those accompanying children must be checked in through the Raptor Visitor Management System (unless they are members or have already been entered into the system).

4. Community Members, who are not swimming, will NOT be permitted to use shower facilities.

   1. Shower ONLY general admission and passes are no longer available. Patrons who have a valid shower pass may use the remaining visits but MUST use the Individual Changing Rooms (ICR). These will not be renewed.

The original problem of men being allowed in girls’ locker rooms remains. Sex offenders will and have found ways to exploit “gender-inclusive” policies. In a motion to dismiss a charge in Fairfax County last year, Cox himself wrote:

Nudity alone is not indecent, or we could not have public locker rooms at all. And the question of whether it is indecent for a transgender person to be nude in the locker room that they identify with has also been answered by our courts, our legislatures, and public opinion, and the answer is, No. So whatever it is that my accuser calls “indecent,” other than the anti-trans discrimination that she harbors in her own mind, it has not been and cannot be proven to the court. . . .

Why is the Magistrate spending taxpayer dollars writing a summons for this, or why is the Commonwealth’s Attorney, prosecuting it, when the laws of the United States, of the Commonwealth of Virginia and Fairfax County are on my side? What I did was not illegal and I should not be harassed by this.

Even if this was an isolated incident, the school district should do everything it can to protect children going forward. APS’s first step should have been to reverse the policy that allows people to be nude in opposite-sex locker rooms. So-called gender-inclusive policies always seem to exclude from their considerations the most vulnerable. In this case, APS has established policies to appease transgender people while making conditions less safe for young girls and their mothers.

McDougal said it best: “It’s an abuse of women’s right to feel safe in public spaces. I understand there are a lot of people who say you can’t take away a person’s right to use a bathroom that they feel is appropriate for them. But this loophole is what created this situation for us. And he was allowed to enter that restroom, that facility, because he identified as transgender.”