A federal judge on Friday blocked Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) from suspending a male high-school student over a “transgender” student’s allegations that he sexually harassed her by complaining about her presence in the boys’ locker room.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema granted a preliminary injunction against LCPS’ discipline of the boy, which included a 10-day suspension and a finding of sexual harassment under Title IX. As requested by the boy’s family, which is suing LCPS, these measures will be put on hold while the case proceeds through the courts.
“I am glad my son is able to keep going to school while we continue to fight for his free speech rights — which affects all students and families in this district moving forward,” the boy’s father, Seth Wolfe, said in a Friday press release from the Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center (FFLC).
FFLC is representing the plaintiffs in conjunction with America First Legal (AFL) of Washington, D.C.
The trouble with the “transgender” student began about two years ago, when the male-identifying girl started using the boys’ locker room during physical-education classes at Stone Bridge High School. LCPS policy permits students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to “their consistently asserted gender identity.”
A year ago, the girl filed a Title IX complaint against one of the boys. LCPS looked into it but took no action against the boy.
Then, in March, the girl secretly took video of three boys — two Christians and a Muslim — in the locker room in which they discussed their discomfort with having a girl in the room. “One student in the locker room told LCPS’s Title IX Office that the female student filmed his friend while he was using a urinal,” reported WJLA.
Using that video as evidence, the girl filed another Title IX complaint, this time against all three boys. She alleged that they had made disparaging remarks about her, threatened her with violence, and “misgendered” her (i.e., correctly referred to her as a girl).
LCPS promptly launched an investigation into the girl’s charges. When the boys’ parents asked the district to similarly investigate her for recording the video, LCPS declined, merely punishing her with an in-school suspension.
Ultimately, the district found the two Christian boys guilty of Title IX sexual harassment and suspended them. It dropped the charges against the Muslim boy.
Although the family of one of the Christian boys moved out of state, Wolfe’s son continues to attend LCPS and would have been forced to stay home the first 10 days of this school year had his family not sued.
Last month, Brinkema, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, issued an emergency injunction against the discipline. Friday’s injunction extends that stay.
According to WJLA, Brinkema wrote that “the balance of equities tips in [the male student’s] favor, given that [the student] is likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of a temporary restraining order holding [the student’s] 10-day suspension in abeyance.”
In addition:
The court also found many of the allegations in the complaint to be troubling, particularly LCPS offering a private changing area to the boys but not to the female student accessing the male locker room and LCPS’s dismissal of the accusations against a Muslim student “who seems to have engaged in similar activity” to the two Christian boys who LCPS found responsible for Title IX sexual harassment and sex based discrimination.
At the time, Renae Smith, the mother of the boy who moved out of state, told WJLA that the injunction
gives me a lot of hope. LCPS violated my son’s rights and turned around and punished him when they really should have been protecting him. I just wonder how many other boys in Loudoun County, or even across the nation, feel the same way — feel very strongly about sharing a restroom or a locker room with the opposite sex, but are terrified to speak up because they’re going to get branded a sexual harasser?
Smith and Wolfe are both worried that the Title IX convictions on their sons’ academic records will hurt their chances for college admission, especially since the boys are juniors and already beginning to apply to colleges.
“That’s one of our major concerns,” Wolfe told WJLA Friday.
Those concerns, of course, will only be fully put to rest if the Wolfe family wins its case.
Brinkema appears to be approaching the case evenhandedly, according to WJLA’s account:
On Friday, the judge grilled attorneys for both sides — questioning the Loudoun County School Board about its handling of the whole situation and cautioning the family’s attorney that some of their claims might not stand up in court.
AFL’s Ian Prior told the station:
We have several counts in this complaint, and you only need to be able to succeed on one of those, but I think we articulated that we’re likely to succeed on all of those counts. But the key here really is that, as the judge recognized, there are serious constitutional questions involved in this case, and it’s important that while those constitutional questions are resolved in the litigation, that the education experience not be taken away.
While it battles the Wolfe family in court, LCPS must also defend its policies against the U.S. Department of Education, which found that the district violated Title IX by treating the parties to the complaint inequitably.