Education
Minnesota Lawsuit Combines Transgender Student, Twerking, Title IX
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A public high school in Minnesota has found itself in the center of a lawsuit claiming that it ignored accounts of a transgender student twerking and grinding, among other things, in the girls’ locker room.
In all, 11 families are being represented in the federal lawsuit by Alliance Defending Freedom, which requests that the Virginia Public Schools’ policy allowing members of the opposite sex to enter showers and locker rooms come to an end.
“School policies should promote the rights and safety of every student, but that’s not what Virginia Public Schools is doing – and it’s certainly not what the departments of Education and Justice are doing,” ADF senior counsel Gary McCaleb said. “No child should be forced into an intimate setting, like a locker room, with someone of the opposite sex.”
Filed in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, the lawsuit states that the Obama administration had wrongfully redefined the meaning of Title IX in order to provide protection for transgender students against discrimination based on their gender identity, writes Kelsey Harkness for The Daily Signal.
Defendants in the case include Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Independent School District Number 706 (the Virginia School District), and Secretary of Education John King, Jr.
The district had decided to allow transgender students access to the locker rooms, showers and bathrooms with which they identify as a result of a directive issued by the Justice Department and the Department of Education that warned schools they could lose their federal funding if they did not accommodate transgender students.
“No government agency should hold hostage important education funding to advance an unlawful agenda,” the lawsuit states. “No school district should trade its students’ constitutional and statutory rights for dollars and cents, especially when it means abandoning a common sense practice that long protected every student’s privacy and access to education.”
The new policy at the district had allowed the transgender student in question to use the bathroom and locker room that he felt comfortable using. In addition, the student was allowed to participate on girls’ athletic teams, writes Todd Starnes for Fox News.
The lawsuit states that the sexually suggestive actions of the student in the locker room caused a number of girls to be reduced to tears.
According to the plaintiffs, the student made several comments pertaining to girls’ bodies while in the locker room, including asking one girl her bra size and asking her to “trade body parts” with him. In addition, it is said that he had danced to loud music that contained sexually explicit lyrics. This included twerking, grinding, and lifting his skirt to show his underwear. The lawsuit states that he was “dancing like he was on a stripper pole” to songs such as “Milkshake” by Kelis.
In response to complaints made by several girls at the school, administrators told the students that if they felt uncomfortable they had the option of using an alternative locker room located in the basement of the elementary school.
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