A federal judge on Friday denied the Justice Department’s request to join a lawsuit filed by two families who say a Virginia school district improperly punished their sons for allegedly harassing another student over their gender identity.
The complaint alleges that the two high school boys were wrongfully suspended for expressing their discomfort last spring with the presence of a student who “appeared as female” in a boys’ locker room at Stone Bridge High School. The school district has said the student was assigned female at birth but identifies as male.
The lawsuit against Loudoun County Public Schools further seeks to overturn a policy in the district that allows students to use bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities that match their gender identity, and not just their sex.
The Justice Department, which has challenged similar policies in other states, began an investigation into the Loudoun case last year, then sought to join the parents’ lawsuit. The agency argues the facilities policy discriminates against the students on the basis of religion because it directs the students to go against their beliefs and practices as Christians.
At a hearing Friday in Alexandria, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema denied the department’s request to join the lawsuit. Brinkema said allowing the Justice Department to join the case would require her to overturn the existing law that the school district’s policy falls in line with.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled in the case of Grimm v. Gloucester County (Virginia) School Board that school districts could not discriminate against transgender students by prohibiting them from using restrooms that match their gender identity.
“I don’t see any basis on which you should be intervening in this case,” Brinkema told attorneys for the Justice Department.
The Department of Justice declined to comment Friday.
Brinkema also dismissed part of the family’s lawsuit alleging that Loudoun school officials conspired to retaliate against the students for bringing a lawsuit, and a section where the families claimed the teens could not be expected to know what gender identity harassment entailed, calling it a vague term.
Brinkema said Virginia courts have already decided the term gender identity is not ambiguous.
“This whole she/he/him/her has been around for years,” Brinkema said, adding she doesn’t buy teenagers would be in the dark about the meaning of gender identity.
Brinkema ordered the families and school district to try to settle the lawsuit through court mediation. The timeline for the case is up in the air, with final discovery being postponed until after an attempt at mediation.
A Loudoun schools spokesperson said the district was aware of the developments but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing litigation.
Victoria Cobb, president of the Founding Freedoms Law Center, one of the groups representing the families, said the school district was “desperate to have this case dismissed because they wrongly targeted boys in their ideological battle rather than respecting their privacy rights. Today’s ruling advances the fundamental claims of our case.”
The Virginia case drew attention from federal and state officials last year after the boys’ families revealed the investigation in May. Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R) launched opened an investigation into the incident. The U.S. Department of Education also weighed in, saying the district had discriminated against the suspended students on the basis of sex, and retaliated against them “by failing to treat the parties equitably” during its investigation.
The Loudoun school district said in court filings that it opened an investigation after a student filed a Title IX complaint in March against the two plaintiffs, along with a third boy, who is not included in the families’ lawsuit. Title IX bars discrimination on the basis of sex, which includes gender identity.
The student who filed the Title IX complaint has not been publicly identified, and The Washington Post has been unable to reach them.
In court documents, the district said the investigation found that the two suspended teens had for months harassed the student, who the district said submitted audio and video recordings as evidence. In one such recording, one of the accused boys could be heard yelling “girl boy” at the student six times, the filings say.
The case is part of a broader fight over the transgender facilities policies in Northern Virginia schools. The Loudoun district is one of four school systems in the region threatened with losing funding by the Trump administration if officials did not change the policies and other protections for transgender students.
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