A Virginia school district is under fire from parents for allowing a man into high school women’s locker rooms, where he exposed himself to women and girls. The Defense of Freedom Institute has asked the Department of Education to investigate this Title IX violation.
Arlington Public Schools (APS) allowed Richard Cox, a registered sex offender prior to his most recent arrest, to use the women’s locker room because he claimed to identify as female. Complaints from parents and community members stacked up for months, ABC 7 reports, before Cox was arrested in early December.
He now faces nine charges related to his unlawful presence and misconduct at local pools.
The school district makes its swimming pools, located on high school campuses, available for public use and swimming lessons after school hours. APS allows visitors to use the locker room of their choice, meaning that men claiming to be women may use the women’s facilities.
Cox told district employees that he identifies as a woman, but nothing about his physical appearance reads as female. He had previously driven several women at a local Planet Fitness to leave the gym when he used the women’s locker rooms, per ABC 7. (Like APS, Planet Fitness allows customers to use the facilities of their choosing without regard to their sex.)
By allowing Cox into women’s locker rooms, APS inadvertently exposed the absurdity of “gender identity.” Someone who has a man’s body, a man’s name and a man’s clothing can claim a female identity, thus gaining access to women’s facilities over the objections of the women involved.
When women complained that a man was watching them and their daughters change clothes, a district employee took no action against Cox and instead advised the women to use the family restroom. The district later published “Locker Room Rules and Etiquette” that advised pool-goers to “cover intimate body areas when using shared spaces.” This was clearly advice Cox had no intention of following, and for anyone who just wants to change clothes, it is difficult to abide by.
The Biden-Harris administration tried to take the district’s dangerous “self-identification” policy nationwide through its now-defunct Title IX rule. The rule required schools to treat students in line with their feelings about their gender identity, not their biological sex. Thankfully, the rule was halted by a federal judge after being temporarily blocked in most states.
The Trump Education Department made quick work of undoing the harm done by gender ideology when it recently announced that it would enforce the 2020 DeVos Title IX rule in the wake of the court’s ruling wiping the Biden-Harris rule from the books. In addition, President Trump’s Executive Order on Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government defines sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification” and demands that all federal agencies, including the Department of Education, “enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality.”
APS should be on notice that its unlawful anti-woman policy will not be allowed to stand. To bring the district’s actions — and inactions — to the attention of the Department of Education, the Defense of Freedom Institute has filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights signed by Ginny Gentles, an Arlington mother whose girls used the pool and is appalled by the district’s behavior.
Based on DFI’s complaint, the Office for Civil Rights has decided to investigate the district’s violation of Title IX. The law does not allow school districts to ignore the rights of women and girls to sex-separated intimate spaces, and Arlington Public Schools has fallen short of its duty in its pursuit of “gender identity” inclusion at all costs.
As Arlington parents know all too well, the safety of women and girls is too high a cost to accommodate a sex offender.
Angela Morabito is a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and the spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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