TWIBS: Department of Justice Interferes in Virginia Public School Case
A case of school bullying has been transformed into a freedom of religion case that demands the Justice Department’s attention, as if by magic!
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Back in August, I reported that three high school students in Loudoun County, Virginia, were issued punishments for harassing a transgender classmate in the locker room. Now, two of those boys’ parents are suing the school system, and the Justice Department is backing them
Loudoun County Public Schools issued a 10-day in school suspension to the students as a result of footage recorded by the trans student. While the punished students maintain that they were simply expressing discomfort at the presence of a trans person in their locker room, rather than actively bullying the trans student, LCPS told Newsweek, “At no time would LCPS suspend a student simply because they express discomfort. A reading of our Title IX resources should make it clear that there is a high bar to launch a Title IX investigation and an even higher bar to determine a student is in violation of Title IX.”
LCPS and four other Virginia school systems are also being targeted by the federal government for having trans-inclusive policies, which the government wrongly alleges violates Title IX student protections. They’ve been placed on “reimbursement only” status, meaning that expenditures must be made and then requests for repayment from the government filed after the fact, rather than receiving federal funding upfront and spending it as necessary.
It’s important to note that LCPS, and the other school systems that refuse to back down on trans-inclusive policies, are in fact complying with model policies issued by the Virginia Department of Education, as well as a federal ruling made by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (and upheld by the Supreme Court) in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board. Were LCPS to comply with the Trump administration’s demand that they do harm to trans students, they would be in violation of state and federal laws.
Now the Justice Department wants to involve themselves in a suit, S.W. et al v. Loudoun County School Board, brought against Loudoun County School Board by Founding Freedoms Law Center and America First Legal. It’s worth knowing that FFLC is the legal arm of the anti-abortion group The Family Foundation, and AFL is Stephen Miller’s legal harassment engine built to defend the Trump administration from lawsuits alleging executive overreach.
The FFLC and AFL are pursuing a religious freedom angle in suing the school board. Their original complaint reads, “Plaintiffs are Christians and hold religious beliefs directing the importance of personally maintaining basic distinctions between males and females, and hold significant religious objections to being in a state of undress in the presence of the opposite sex or with an undressed member of the opposite sex, particularly in sex-separate changing facilities.”
The complaint also alleges that the trans student involved in the incident violated LCPS rules by filming in a locker room. In my previous article on the issue, I mentioned that this was factually correct—LCPS has strict rules against recording in private spaces like changing facilities, exempt only in the case of medical emergencies—but the student was investigated by LCPS and ultimately cleared of wrongdoing.
The Justice Department filed their motion to intervene on Monday, claiming that they have a right to be involved in the case as the plaintiffs allege religious discrimination took place. A Justice Department statement reads, “The Justice Department announced today that it filed legal action against the Loudoun County (Va.) School Board (Loudoun County) for its denial of equal protection based on religion. The suit alleges that Loudoun County applied Policy 8040, which requires students and faculty to accept and promote gender ideology, to two Christian, male students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
It seems unlikely to me that the Fourteenth Amendment says anything at all about “gender ideology,” but I’m not a lawyer, so what do I know?
A quote from Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, reads, “Students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate. Loudoun County’s decision to advance and promote gender ideology tramples on the rights of religious students who cannot embrace ideas that deny biological reality.”
More than 200 former employees of the Justice Department’s civil rights division (including as much as 75% of its attorneys) resigned when Dhillon made it clear she planned to turn the division into a cudgel that the Trump administration could use to harm their enemies. On Tuesday, they signed an open letter decrying the division’s destruction.
The Justice Department’s involvement would certainly be bad news for the already beleaguered LCPS, though how they intend to argue in court that Christians have a substantive legal right to discriminate against others is beyond me. Federal courts in Virginia have already signaled a willingness to protect trans rights in public schools, but then again, should the case ultimately go to the Supreme Court with its blatantly slanted conservative majority, it’s anybody’s guess what will happen.
Anything is better than 10 days of in school suspension, I suppose!
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
