Two school districts on Long Island violated New York State law when they enacted similar policies last year that barred transgender students from bathrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity, the state’s Education Department ruled this week.
Board members at both school systems, the Massapequa School District and the Locust Valley Central School District, had approved restrictions weeks apart that required students to use facilities that were gender neutral or corresponded with their sex assigned at birth.
On Monday, the state’s education commissioner, Betty A. Rosa, struck down the policies, calling them discriminatory and illegal, the latest political fight in the United States over transgender rights and gender identity.
The case was brought by the parents of a transgender student in Massapequa, who said the school system’s policy had caused her to feel anxious, depressed and suicidal.
“These were the predictable results of Massapequa’s actions, which targeted a discrete group of people who have become increasingly vilified by irresponsible adults,” Ms. Rosa wrote.
Emma Hulse, an education counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed the case, said in a statement, “These transphobic resolutions flagrantly violate New York laws, which unequivocally prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.”
The Locust Valley and Massapequa school systems did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Rosa ordered them to allow students to use any school facility that “most closely aligned with their gender identity.”
The issue of transgender rights has become a major cultural flashpoint in recent years, led by social conservatives and Republicans who have pursued restrictions on transgender Americans at the local, state and federal levels. Those efforts have ratcheted up during President Trump’s second term.
The federal government has threatened to hold back or has pulled funding from school districts across the country over their bathroom and sports participation policies. Last fall, the Department of Education cut more than $35 million in grants from New York City schools. A federal judge recently ruled that the funding had been improperly withheld.
The decision this week by New York’s education commissioner was the latest clash between her department and the Massapequa School District, which, along with Locust Valley, is in a reliably Republican area of Nassau County on Long Island. Locust Valley was added to the case because its board of education had approved a resolution “materially identical” to that of Massapequa’s.
There are about 6,500 students in Massapequa and 1,800 in Locust Valley.
The Massapequa School District sued Ms. Rosa in October in the Eastern District of New York after the commissioner issued a temporary order barring it from enforcing the restrictions.
Massapequa had argued in that case, which has not been resolved, that its policy aligned with several executive orders from Mr. Trump that targeted the legal rights of transgender people and with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. It said that Ms. Rosa’s order in October had entitled “biological males to enter intimate spaces with biological females for an indefinite period of time.”
The two sides also had faced off earlier last year, after the school district sued the state Education Department over its policy barring the use of Native American team names and mascots. The school district in Massapequa, which derives its name from the Native American word that translates to “great waterland,” uses a side profile of a Native American man in a feathered headdress as its mascot. Massapequa High School’s team name is the “Chiefs.”
The feud caught the attention of Mr. Trump and his administration, whose education secretary, Linda McMahon, visited Massapequa last year to support the district’s effort to keep the mascot.
Matthew Haag is a Times education reporter focusing on New York City schools.
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