Education Department Acts Against Loudoun County as School Punishes Boys in ‘Retaliation’ for Attacking Trans Policy

A Northern Virginia school district will suspend two boys who complained when a girl, who identifies as a boy, used their locker room at school—and the district will also force the boys to work out a “corrective action plan” with school administrators.

“We will be on guard for any attempts to create a plan of indoctrination into the district’s denial of reality and science,” Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, told The Daily Signal. The foundation’s legal arm, the Founding Freedoms Law Center, is representing the two boys.

Loudoun County Public Schools investigated three high school boys for “sexual harassment” in violation of Title IX—a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination—after they complained about the girl in their locker room. The girl reportedly used her phone to record the boys complaining about her—a violation of school district policy—but the district investigated the boys, not the girl who recorded them.

According to the boys’ attorney, Josh Hetzler, the punishment includes 10 days of suspension and a no-contact order with the girl, who the boys caught in the boys’ locker room, along with the corrective action plan, which Cobb said has yet to be “determined.”

Jason Miyares, Virginia’s Republican attorney general, has announced an investigation into the school district over the incident.

“Loudoun County Public Schools weaponized Title IX to punish male students for expressing discomfort at being forced to share a locker room with a female student,” Miyares told The Daily Signal. “This suspension is completely unjustified and tramples their constitutional rights. My office is monitoring the situation.” 

Virginia Governor Weighs In

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, addressed the issue on “The John Fredericks Radio Show” on Tuesday.

He noted that “instead of pursuing an investigation into the biological female, the school system pursues an investigation against these three young students who are simply uncomfortable because there is a biological female in the male locker room.”

Youngkin noted Miyares’ investigation and said the attorney general thinks “this was a retaliatory process against these three young men.”

He also noted that Loudoun County Public Schools initially investigated three boys—one Muslim, two Christian—but dropped the investigation into the Muslim boy, while holding the Christian boys on the hook.

“This is just shocking, shocking behavior from a school system that’s supposed to be looking out for students, as opposed to driving this liberal-left agenda,” the governor added.

Youngkin hearkened back to 2021, the year he won election as governor, when a 15-year-old male student forced a girl to commit sex acts in the girls bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia, the same school the boys currently under investigation attend.

“Instead of holding the perpetrator accountable, they moved him to another school where he sexually assaulted another innocent victim,” Youngkin noted. The student who had abused the girl at Stone Bridge in May 2021 went on to sexually assault another girl in the girls restroom at Broad Run High School in October of that year.

The Loudoun County Juvenile Court had found the perpetrator “not innocent” of charges of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio. The student also pleaded “no contest” to charges of abduction and sexual battery on Oct. 6.

Loudoun County Transgender Policy

The current scandal has drawn attention to Loudoun County Public Schools’ Policy 8040, which allows students to use their chosen names and gender pronouns, and opens sports, restrooms, and locker rooms to students on the basis of claimed gender identity, rather than biological sex.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found this policy in violation of Title IX earlier this year.

On Tuesday, the department announced new action against Loudoun County and four other Northern Virginia school districts. The department is cutting off all federal funding from the districts, with the exception of funding by reimbursement. The school districts refused to sign the department’s proposed resolution agreement by the deadline on Friday.

“States and school districts cannot openly violate federal law while simultaneously receiving federal funding with no additional scrutiny,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. “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.”

“We have given these Northern Virginia school divisions every opportunity to rectify their policies, which blatantly violate Title IX,” she added. “Today’s accountability measures are necessary because they have stubbornly refused to provide a safe environment for young women in their schools.” 

Loudoun County Public Schools did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.

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