I had a strange sense of deja vu as I read this the other day:
Loudoun County Public Schools has opened a Title IX investigation into three high school boys who said they were uncomfortable with a female student using the boys’ locker room.The Loudon County School Board policy allows students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identification, rather than biological sex.
Back in 2021, a trans-identifying boy had raped a girl in a Loudoun school girls bathroom. The school district covered up the crime and transferred the boy to another school where he proceeded to sexually assault a second girl.
The episode helped juice the 2021 Loudoun County school protests and lead to the Republicans generating an 11-point swing and propelling Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s mansion later that year. To top it off the school superintendent faced criminal charges for covering up the matter.
Usually when a scandal like this breaks, the organization involved is a bit chastened and becomes purer than Caesar’s wife. Yet less than four years later, here’s Loudoun not only playing bathroom games but crushing students who complain.
When Youngkin came into office, he issued some model policies on the matter, which, by law, school districts are obligated to follow. However, there was no enforcement mechanism and it’s clear Loudoun County ignored Youngkin’s policies. Obviously, the radicals in Loudoun County are, to quote a former Minnesota governor, dug in like an Alabama tick.
In many ways, transgenderism in school issues is like Vietnam battles. We would conduct search and destroy missions, win a village or a hilltop, and when we moved on the enemy came back and reoccupied the terrain. So we had to fight for the same territory again and again.
What was actually accomplished over the past four years?
In fairness to Youngkin, there was little he could do, given that Virginia is essentially a blue state. Also he operated in the old, pre-Trump-47 world where Republicans were reluctant to engage in total political war over social and educational policy.
Virginia presents reformers with the additional difficulty that a governor is limited to only one term. Given that this is true, and the high probability that a Democrat will win the state races in 2025, the radicals ensconced in the Virginia districts will simply keep their heads down until Youngkin can be replaced by a Democrat.
The experience in Virginia illustrates the problems school reformers face in all but the reddest of states. The Left’s strategy nationwide is: keep your head down, make accommodations where you must, but sooner or later the natural equilibrium in schools will reassert itself and school districts will accommodate the radicals and their policies.
There may be some states where such reform is possible, where there is enough of a political consensus to take the time to clear out the radicals. However, those are the exceptions that prove the rule, because they are committed to long-term reform that extends beyond any one elected official or electoral cycle. Unless you deal with the strategic power of the Left in the schools, you will be returning to retake the same village time and time again.
As the experience in Virginia shows, it’s going to take more than a single Republican electoral victory to restore parental rights and sanity to our schools. It’s going to take going after the Schwerpunkt of the Left’s grip on public education by:
1) The breaking of higher education’s monopoly on teacher certification, by developing alternate methods that do not require a four-year degree in education.
2) In the various university-level teacher programs, a reform of curriculum to eliminate the teaching of radical ideologies regarding race, gender, and postmodernism.
3) The statewide development of model policies and curriculum, and their legal enforcement through the criminal code or the withholding of state money.
Then there is always the nuclear option — or if you like the punitive expedition. Get the Trump DOJ to come to Loudoun County, sue it for civil rights violations, and then get it subject to a consent decree that would lead to school choice and/or federal supervision.
I would like to think, given that Louisiana is still dealing with school desegregation orders from 50+ years ago, that Loudoun and similar jurisdictions would want to avoid that albatross at all costs.
Enough is enough. Destroy the K-12 school system in order to save public education.
One means to tackle the problem would be to take over the accreditation system. From there, you could demand reforms and intellectual rigor.
(I’m sure someone will come along and tell me it just can’t be done….)
” … three high school boys who said they were uncomfortable with a female student using the boys’ locker room.”
That really is the bombshell — the decline of testosterone! Back in the Jurassic, the big problem with education was that post-pubescent teenage boys spent almost all their waking & sleeping hours lusting after teenage girls – and the closer those girls were to naked, the better. A teenage girl would not have stepped into the boys’ locker room and started undressing — because she knew exactly what would have happened next.
It is tough to be a teenage male with a body swept with hormones. At least, it used to be. But that was when boys were boys.
I don’t know about testosterone but those boys may just be smart enough to understand just which way any sort of “harassment” conflict would go. While their risk of physical attack probably isn’t the same as a girl in the opposite scenario, their legal jeopardy is infinitely greater.
Try to imagine the attractiveness, both personality and physical, of the trans student using the boys’ locker room.
Might have more to do with the boys discomfort than any supposed lack of testosterone.
Hank A: “Try to imagine the attractiveness, both personality and physical, of the trans student using the boys’ locker room.”
Excellent point! Still, back in the days before testosterone became a prohibited substance, if a truly butt-ugly unpleasant female student started to undress in front of normal teenage boys, their normal reaction would have been to mock her mercilessly … not to file a law suit. For Goodness Sake, teenage boys mock the appearance of other teenage boys all the time … or at least they used to. Getting mocked would have given that “transgendered” female the true experience of being male that she apparently wants.
Maybe there is more to this story than we know.
Splitting the difference between Gavin and MCS, and mindful of the rampant incidence of inaccurate identification of people’s sex in modern media, I do wonder if the individual identified as a ‘female student’ is a cross-dressing male who knows he’d get his ass kicked if he showed up in the girl’s locker room and is tolerated (barely) by the boys due to the threat of school punishment.