The latest legal maneuver in a months-long dispute invoking competing definitions of Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, saw the Department of Justice file suit against Virginia’s Loudoun County School Board, accusing the school district of discriminating against two Christian students who were suspended after objecting to a transgender student using a boys’ locker room.  

“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,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division wrote, announcing the lawsuit.

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The suit is based on differing interpretations of Title IX, which has been turned upside down by the Trump administration in its attempted erasure of transgender identity in the United States.

Now the DOJ is injecting religious discrimination into the dispute.

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The Biden administration expanded the definition of Title IX to include discrimination protections for transgender individuals; a series of executive orders has attempted to strip those protections by declaring the existence of only “two biological sexes: male and female,” with the threat of withdrawing federal funding from states and local entities as a cudgel.

The DOJ’s lawsuit is based on actions the Loudoun County School Board took in April, after a trans athlete recorded two fellow students in a boys’ locker room making disparaging comments about him.

Heather Bardot, attorney for the school board, said in an October 6 opposition to a motion in a related proceeding that the transgender male student was “tired of the relentless harassment” and decided to record the boys in the locker room to have proof in a formal Title IX complaint he filed just a few days later, Inside NOVA, reports.

After an investigation, the school board announced in August that the two students would be suspended for 10 days, saying they had violated its policy prohibiting “discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual harassment and assault” in the district’s educational programs and activities. 

In the DOJ’s telling, the two boys were suspended on the basis of “sex-based discrimination” and were made to “submit to a ‘Comprehensive Student Support Plan’ that further violates the boys’ right to free exercise of religion at school.” The DOJ said that, as Christians, the boys’ “religious beliefs require them to use biologically accurate pronouns and use sex-segregated facilities.”

In May, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R), who has supported transgender sports bans and restrictions on gender-affirming care, opened a separate inquiry into how the school district was handling its investigation into the locker room incident.

Miyares referred the case to the Trump administration’s Department of Education and Department of Justice, both of which have increasingly been used to target transgender communities.

By July, the DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights concluded that the school district was in violation of the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, for basing same-sex facility access on gender identity rather than “biological sex.” 

The DOJ gave the school district 10 days to reverse its policy.

The school board refused, voting to maintain access for trans students.

In response, the administration has ramped up pressure on the district, moving toward withholding tens of millions of dollars from the state for Loudoun County and other school districts, citing noncompliance with the administration’s anti-trans diktats. The new lawsuit relies on an argument that the school district violated the religious rights of the suspended students in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  

While the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled specifically on the Trump administration’s definition of Title IX when it comes to education, it did state in its 2024 ruling in U.S. v Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, that a person’s “transgender” identification is distinct from their “biological sex,” a decision the Trump administration has cited in its effort to ban trans students from sports and same-sex bathroom and locker facilities.

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