Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: How Spanberger Buried a Rule to Protect Girls

Earlier this month, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger was finally clear about her permissive stance on boys in girls’ sports and bathrooms. During her campaign, though, she ran from a reporter and offered word salad answers whenever the issue came up.

On Sept. 8, from the stage at Virginia’s Pridefest in Richmond, Spanberger told the crowd she’d been moved to tears by a transgender-identifying child’s story, and wanted LGBT Virginians to know they have a governor who values them.

And to that end, on July 30, six weeks before her emotional Pridefest remarks, she had quietly killed a Virginia Board of Health rulemaking process that would have barred males from competing in girls’ sports and using girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms.

The process began last year whenthree current or former collegiate female swimmers had petitioned the Virginia Board of Health to keep males out of female-only athletic competitions and out of spaces where girls and women are likely to be undressed.

The board voted unanimously, 14-0, in August 2025 in favor of the petition. Three months later, then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin formally asked the board to draft a rule based on that petition.

A public comment period ran from Nov. 17 to Dec. 17, 2025, drawing 321 comments. Under Virginia’s process, that Notice of Intended Regulatory Action stage should have been followed by a Proposed Regulation, which then goes through its own review. Instead, after Spanberger’s January 2026 inauguration, the process simply stalled.

Her office eventually concluded the rule fell outside the Board of Health’s authority—a position reached, notably, after consulting Attorney General Jay “two bullets” Jones, whose office has had its own struggles lately, including trouble spelling “Virginia,” and filing emergency applications with the right court.

The ACLU of Virginia and Equality Virginia had made the identical argument when the petition was first filed, warning it exceeded the board’s authority and would draw legal challenges. It’s a curious line for Spanberger to lean on, given that “inviting legal challenges” rarely stops Democrats from doing much else.

Had the rule been finalized, Virginia would finally have had a state-level enforcement mechanism—a regulation codified in the Virginia Administrative Code, binding statewide and enforceable through the Department of Health. That’s a different animal entirely from the Virginia Department of Education’s model policies, which are just recommendations that school boards are free to ignore.

In July 2023, the Youngkin administration adopted new model policies—”Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools”—recommending that sports and bathroom access be based on biological sex rather than gender identity. Given their purely symbolic weight, it’s no surprise that Virginia’s largest, most liberal districts, including Fairfax County and Loudoun County, ignored them outright.

Which raises the obvious question: Why didn’t the Youngkin administration start the Board of Health petition process at the beginning of his term instead of the end? A more effective bureaucratic strategy, pursued earlier, would have left Virginia families in a far stronger position today.

Spanberger was never a moderate, and nobody paying attention is surprised she killed a rule protecting girls’ private spaces. What’s striking isn’t the substance—her voting record has always been reliably liberal—it’s that she spent her campaign refusing to give the public the same answers she was fully prepared to act on in private.

In 2022, responding to Youngkin’s original model policies, she wrote that his “mandate targets vulnerable children” and that it’s “downright shameful” for an elected leader to “punch down at kids to score political points,” adding that it “rolls back the rights of kids to be themselves in schools.”

By that logic, apparently, letting children “be themselves” extends to boys in girls’ locker rooms. Spanberger is herself a mother of three daughters in Virginia public schools. It’s worth asking what she’d make of these policies if what happened at one Fairfax County high school happened at her daughters’ school.

Last year, a sophomore boy with facial hair sat in the girls’ locker room, watching freshman girls change for gym class. When the girls reported it, school officials reportedly told them they couldn’t do anything about it because district policy bases locker room access on proclaimed gender identity, not sex.

Is the governor fine with that for her own daughters? Or is this another mandated case of so-called “kindness and inclusion” from thee, but not from me?

In an October 2025 interview with Katie Couric, Spanberger suggested parents are just “confused” about the issue: “I really do believe that we should, as a society, as a whole, demonstrate a fair amount of grace to people who are confused about when we’re talking about bathrooms or when we’re talking about sports participation, like, what are we talking about?”

Parents aren’t confused, governor. We’re rightly worried, and rightly angry. And we certainly don’t appreciate being patronized.

Spanberger’s decision to end this rulemaking was never really about legal authority. If it were, her office would have said so in July, not buried it for six weeks until she could unveil it on a Pridefest stage to cheers and tears. The timing tells the real story: silence when it might cost her politically, tears when it could earn her praise from the constituency she needed to please. That is not moral clarity. That is stagecraft.

And it leaves Virginia families exactly where we started. Youngkin’s model policies were symbolic and toothless from the start, ignored by the state’s largest districts the moment they were published. The Board of Health rule was a mechanism that could have actually forced compliance.

Instead, it died quietly, seven months after it stalled, at the hand of a governor who spent her campaign refusing to say in public what she was already prepared to do in private.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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