The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia is suing the Hanover County School Board for refusing to comply with a 2020 law that requires school districts statewide to adopt protections for transgender students.
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The Hanover school board voted 4-to-3 on Nov. 9 against a revision to its rules that would have permitted transgender students to use bathrooms and attend sex-specific classes that match their gender identities. School staff said the revision was meant to bring the school district into compliance with the 2020 transgender student law.
The ACLU of Virginia filed suit a month later.
“By refusing to adopt policies that protect transgender students, as required by Virginia law, the School Board threatens transgender students’ entire identity, ostracizes them and deprives them of the basic humanity and belongingness where they have the same opportunities as cisgender students to thrive,” reads the 19-page complaint filed in Hanover County Circuit Court on Thursday.
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“It is not the School Board’s practice to comment on pending litigation,” Ola Hawkins, the board’s chair, said by email Thursday.
It is the first such lawsuit against a Virginia school district, although a handful of other systems have also denied or delayed granting transgender students access to sex-specific facilities — flouting the 2020 law, which stated districts must adopt transgender protections by fall 2021. No district has faced punishment from state government officials so far.
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The ACLU of Virginia filed the Hanover suit on behalf of five families, all of whom have transgender children enrolled in Hanover County Public Schools. The plaintiffs are asking that the circuit court judge force the school system to allow transgender children access to bathrooms that match their gender identities.
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“My 13-year-old son only wants to use the boys’ bathroom like the other boys,” Kelly Merrill, one of the parent plaintiffs, said in a statement. “He deserves to feel safe at school.”
The transgender student law, passed in 2020, required the Virginia Department of Education to set rules for the treatment of transgender students — rules that urge schools, among other things, to permit students access to bathrooms that match their gender identities and require teachers to address transgender children by their names and pronouns.
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The law then mandated that all of Virginia’s more than 130 school districts adopt guidelines mirroring the state education department’s rules by the start of the 2021-2022 school year.
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LGBTQ advocates hailed the law as a major victory. They contend that lack of access to bathrooms, as well as the inability to swiftly alter names and pronouns in school documents, causes pain for children and can contribute to suicide attempts. Research suggests there are about 4,000 transgender children in Virginia and studies show that transgender youth attempt suicide at a much higher rate than cisgender youth.
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But backlash has swelled, too, most notably in Loudoun County, where a physical education teacher is suing over the requirement that he address transgender children with their preferred pronouns.
At least six school districts, including Hanover, have rejected proposed protective policies for transgender students, according to a private tally kept — and provided to The Washington Post — by LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Virginia.
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It is unclear what penalties noncompliant districts — which include those in Accomack, Augusta, Bedford, Pittsylvania, Carroll and Russell counties — may face. Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle on Thursday pointed to a memo issued over the summer by state superintendent of public instruction James Lane. “Local school boards that elect not to adopt policies assume all legal responsibility for noncompliance,” Lane wrote.
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He added that refusal to comply could be “costly for local school boards due to civil litigation” and suggested school boards confer with their lawyers. But, Lane noted, no state funding is in play. Pyle said the state’s education department is not tracking whether districts are in compliance.
Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin may not wish to continue Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s strong support for transgender rights. Youngkin said on the campaign trail that he does not believe transgender children who identify as female should be allowed to participate in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms.
[CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of Kelly Merill, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.]