(LifeSiteNews) – The Democrat nominee for governor of Virginia recently dodged an opportunity to take a clear stand on school transgender policies, a particularly significant issue given the state’s recent history.
The Washington Stand reported that WJLA reporter Nick Minock recently pressed Abigail Spanberger on whether she supports biological males accessing female locker rooms or participating in female sports. Instead of answering, the former congresswoman simply called for greater clarity between court rulings and federal directives.
“Well, the circumstances this legal case plays out is really one of — we’ve had court cases settled or judged here in Virginia, in the fourth district,” she said. “The former Gavin Grimm case related to bathroom usage. And, in fact, the argument is, the assessment is, there needs to be much clearer guidance in terms of what is an executive order’s binding assessment of Title IX versus what has been a decision of a court.” A follow-up restating the question went unanswered.
Asked again a week later, Spanberger again declined to stake out a position of her own, instead saying she “would support a bill that would put clear provisions in place that provide a lot of local ability for input, based on the age of children, based on the type of sport, based on competitiveness.”
Back in 2022, when Spanberger was still in the House of Representatives, she was more forthright. She condemned outgoing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s model policy keeping males out of female restrooms as “downright shameful” and “roll(ing) back the rights of kids to be themselves in schools.”
Her Republican opponent for the governorship, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, says it’s “common sense” to exclude biological males from female bathrooms, lockers, and teams.
“My opponent, she supports these rogue schools and that means she’s against parents,” Earle-Sears said. “What we are creating in our girl children, especially, I believe, is trauma, trauma that eventually, it’s going to affect them if it hasn’t already, and parents don’t need one more problem that the government has created for their children.”
Critics have long warned that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, and changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
The issue is particularly acute for politicians in Virginia, where years ago the issue was magnified when Loudoun County Public Schools superintendent Scott Ziegler set off a national firestorm for allegedly covering up the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls’ bathroom due to its damaging implications for the LGBT movement. He was convicted in 2023 of “using his official position to retaliate against someone for exercising their rights” by firing a teacher who testified about the situation before a grand jury, but prosecutors eventually dropped charges relating to allegedly lying about having no knowledge of the situation at a school board meeting.
This summer, LCPS actually suspended two male high-school students who objected to having a gender-confused female student in their locker, a move that was condemned by the U.S. Department of Education as a Title IX violation and blocked by a federal judge.
Youngkin was elected in large part as a backlash against perceived disregard for such concerns. Under him, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) promulgated a model policy that requires students to be addressed by their legal names and actual sex, as well as to use biological sex to determine which bathrooms, lockers, or athletic teams they are allowed to access.
But while Virginia law requires public school districts to abide by VDOE model policies, adherence to those policies has long been complicated by a lack of clear enforcement mechanisms, which has enabled districts to get away with flouting them. Democrats’ takeover of the state legislature in 2023 further dashed hopes of curing the situation through new laws.
