Thanks to the Trump administration, progressive Virginia school districts are about to reap what they have sown.
O ne night in 1988, a girl woke up to find a man on top of her while she was at a friend’s house near Falls Church in Virginia. She was a runaway at the time and didn’t report the incident to authorities. But she never forgot her abuser’s face.
So when she saw Richard Cox on TV recently, she says she recognized him as the man who had sexually assaulted her decades earlier. Cox’s face was broadcast across local airwaves late last year after he was accused of and arrested for exposing himself to children in Arlington County women’s locker rooms. (In the 1988 case, the woman identified Cox during a victims’ roundtable this past April, after which Fairfax County police charged Cox with sexual assault.) A tier-three sex offender, Cox is not allowed near facilities that children use. As we reported in February, Cox’s rap sheet is lengthy: In 1992, he exposed his genitals and masturbated in front of a child at a gym; the same year, he was convicted of burglary; in 2007, he was convicted of possessing obscene materials with a minor; in 2021, he was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender; and more.
A lot has changed for Cox since 1988, and not just his status on the sex-offender registry. He now identifies as a woman. Which is why he says he was well within his rights to enter the Wakefield and Washington Liberty high school pool women’s locker rooms, as well as multiple women’s locker rooms at local rec centers.
And, thanks to bad policies passed by Virginia’s progressive school administrators, he’s in some ways correct. Public school districts in Virginia permit individuals to use facilities that align with their gender identity, which allowed the trans-identifying Cox unrestricted access to girls’ locker rooms. He was allowed to stand in the middle of a locker room, naked, as mothers shuffled their confused daughters around him after swim practice.
One of the women who suffered the consequences of this policy is Jen McDougal, who used to take her nine-year-old daughter to swim practice at the Washington-Liberty Aquatics Center, the pool inside of Arlington Public Schools’ Washington-Liberty High School. The center is one of three operated by APS; reserved for students during the day, the pool is open to the public after school hours for classes and lessons.
Pool staffers were not required to verify Cox’s status as a trans-identifying female under Arlington County Public Schools’ policy, which allows individuals to use the bathrooms and facilities that correspond with their gender identity, not biological sex.
When Cox was finally caught by police after a string of additional offenses and reports at other local facilities, APS simply added “additional signage” to pools that “remind all pool patrons to . . . cover intimate body areas when using shared spaces.” Superintendent Francisco Durán assured families that APS would “continue to foster an inclusive community for all.”
Although the district did not knowingly admit a sexual predator into a school-owned locker room, it did pass sweeping policies that made it acceptable, at any point, for a man to enter a women’s locker room. Despite obvious red flags, district officials prohibited staff from questioning Cox’s gender identity.
Which brings us to the present-day clash with the Trump administration. Districts in Alexandria City, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, and Prince William County all have locker-room policies similar to APS’s. The administration is waging war against these districts and promising to strip funding from all five if they do not comply with Title IX by reversing policies that ban sex-segregated facilities. Not so shockingly, all five districts plan to fight the administration’s efforts.
“States and school districts cannot openly violate federal law while simultaneously receiving federal funding with no additional scrutiny,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a press release. “The Northern Virginia School Divisions that are choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law must now prove they are using every single federal dollar for a legal purpose.”
Northern Virginia districts claim that upholding the existing policies fosters an “inclusive” and “safe” environment — and no matter how many sex offenders access women’s locker rooms or how many young girls feel unsafe with boys in their bathrooms, the school districts refuse to give up progressive gender ideology. Districts sincerely believe that the potential to make dozens of gender-dysphoric students feel more comfortable at school is more important than the safety of thousands of Virginia girls. For that, each district deserves every ounce of federal backlash the Trump administration can muster.
To its immense credit, the Trump administration has picked a fight it fully intends to finish. For Republican politicos in the DMV area, this fight is personal. Many live in Virginia, know children who attend Virginia schools, or send their own children to Virginia schools. They want justice for the Virginia children who have been subject to dangerous district policies — children such as McDougal’s nine-year-old daughter and her swim friends; the two high school boys in Loudoun County Public Schools who were recently suspended and accused of sexual harassment for expressing discomfort with the presence of a transgender-identifying female in their locker room; the 15-year-old LCPS girl who in 2021 was raped by a skirt-wearing male in her own bathroom.
Bad people will find a way to do bad things. School districts and public authorities can’t stop predators from prowling — but they can do their best to pass preventive measures. What Virginia school districts have done is the opposite. It’s far past time for them to experience consequences.