Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
A transgender student in a Minnesota public school was caught twerking in a girls’ bathroom and locker room, sparking a lawsuit filed by the parents of the young girls who were exposed to the boy’s lewd display.
The Daily Caller is reporting on the incident which occurred in Minnesota’s Virginia School District s where a transgender student, only identified as Student X in the complaint, began using the girls’ locker room where he would dance in a “sexually explicit manner – ‘twerking,’ ‘grinding’ and dancing like he was on a ‘stripper pole’,” the complaint reads. The music the student danced to contained explicit lyrics, according to the girls.
“On another occasion, a female student saw the male student lift his dress to reveal his underwear while ‘grinding’ to the music,” the lawsuit alleges.
Student X also made comments about the girls’ bodies while he was in their locker room and once asked a female student if he could trade body parts with her.
According to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a public interest law firm, when the incidents began, the girls were unaware that the district had decided to follow federally suggested “guidelines” which advised schools to open their bathroom facilities to students based on gender identity rather than their biological gender. As a result, they were “shocked and alarmed” when the student began using their locker room and behaving in such a vulgar fashion. Because the school is following the government’s guidelines, they now attend a school where there is no reassurance that girls-only facilities will be safe from male intrusion.
As a result of these incidents, the parents of 11 students have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and Minnesota’s Virginia Public Schools for disregarding student privacy and safety.
“School policies should promote the rights and safety of every student, but that’s not what Virginia Public Schools is doing—and it’s certainly not what the departments of Education and Justice are doing,” said ADF Senior Counsel Gary McCaleb. “No child should be forced into an intimate setting, like a locker room, with someone of the opposite sex. Telling girls that their privacy and modesty don’t merit a private and secure changing area is an attack on women. The school district should rescind its privacy-violating policies, and the court should order the DOE and DOJ to stop bullying school districts with falsehoods about what federal law requires.”
The DOE and DOJ are threatening to cut funding from schools who refuse to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms/locker rooms of their choice. The Departments are basing their position on what several courts have already decided is an inaccurate interpretation of Title IX, a 1972 federal law intended to protect women from invidious discrimination and that flatly prohibits schools from discriminating “on the basis of sex.”
As the ADF explains, the DOE and DOJ are unlawfully redefining the terms of Title IX, something that only Congress can alter, and are illegitimately forcing their political will on all public schools across the nation. As the lawsuit points out, no federal law requires schools to allow boys into girls’ locker rooms or girls into boys’ locker rooms, and other courts have rejected the agencies’ interpretation to the contrary. The lawsuit also explains that the DOE did not comply with key provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act when it adopted its rules.
“Federal bureaucrats cannot simply write letters to redefine the meaning of a federal law to serve their own political ends,” added ADF Legal Counsel Doug Wardlow. “The Department of Education went beyond what it is legally and constitutionally allowed to do, and the DOJ is out of bounds in enforcing the DOE’s false interpretation of the law. In fact, several federal courts have already rejected the DOE’s interpretation of Title IX.”
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on September 7. The lawsuit asks the court to halt the school district’s policy that opens up showers and changing areas to the opposite sex and invalidate the DOE’s rule that illegitimately redefines “sex” in Title IX.
ADF is in the process of litigating similar lawsuits in Illinois and Ohio.
Because of the egregious nature of this new cultural trend and the dangers it poses to women and children, we can expect to see many more lawsuits of this kind in the future.
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