The Department of Justice is suing the Loudoun County, Va. school board after the district punished Christian students who oppose sharing bathrooms with students of the other biological sex.
"Students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement Monday. "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."
The lawsuit follows an incident at Loudoun's Stone Bridge High School in which a biologically female student used a men's locker room and took pictures of male students. Two male students, whom the DOJ described as Christians, spoke out against the infraction, leading the school district to suspend them for 10 days because they did not use the female student's preferred pronouns.
A Loudoun County policy orders students to accept the self-declared "gender identity" of classmates and permits students to use bathrooms of the opposite biological sex, stating, "Inadvertent slips in the use of names or pronouns may occur; however, staff or students who intentionally and persistently refuse to respect a student's gender identity by using the wrong name and gender pronoun are in violation of this policy."
According to the DOJ, the policy violates the equal protection rights of Christian students, who may reject some tenets of gender ideology because of their religion.
The lawsuit comes amid the Trump administration's crackdown on gender ideology across the country. On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that the federal government use biologically accurate pronouns and banning men from being held in female prisons. He also signed orders banning transgender people from the military and barring biological men from competing in women's sports.
The Department of Education concluded in July that the transgender policies of five Northern Virginia school districts, including Loudoun, violate Title IX. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the same month that the districts could lose federal funding. So far Loudoun has defied the crackdown, with district voting in August to keep its policies.
Loudoun has long sparked controversy over its transgender policies. The district faced extensive criticism and investigations in 2021 for its response to sexual assaults committed by a male student who reportedly identified as "gender-fluid." A jury convicted the district's former superintendent for retaliation charges connected with the case, but a judge later overturned the verdict and the Virginia attorney general dropped the charges.
