Arlington Public Schools Refuse to Comply With Virginia’s Anti-Trans Policies

Arlington Public Colleges has introduced that they are going to refuse to comply with the Virginia Division of Schooling’s (VDOE) discriminatory policies towards transgender college students within the state, which had been finalized by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) final week.

“Now we have reviewed the mannequin insurance policies and decided that our present insurance policies and coverage implementation procedures that defend the rights of our transgender college students will keep as is,” the Arlington Public Colleges superintendent, Dr. Francisco Durán, wrote in a letter launched on July 20.

The VDOE “model policies” bar transgender college students from faculty sports activities and from utilizing bogs that align with their gender id. Beneath the brand new insurance policies, academics would even be pressured to check with college students by the title and pronouns on their official file, successfully forcing them to misgender a lot of their college students.

“In the present day, Governor Youngkin and the VDOE made a harmful, politically motivated choice to disregard the hundreds of Virginians who submitted public feedback in opposition to his proposed mannequin insurance policies — insurance policies which single out transgender and nonbinary youths in our faculties,” Narissa Rahaman, government director of Equality Virginia, said in an announcement.

The transfer by Arlington Public Colleges comes after different faculty districts within the state, together with Falls Church, Alexandria, and Richmond, introduced earlier this 12 months that they are going to defy VDOE’s transphobic mannequin insurance policies in order to protect their transgender college students.

Many of those insurance policies had been launched as payments within the Virginia legislature this session however were defeated, failing to be signed into regulation. By enacting these insurance policies, Virginia is now in line with states like Florida, Arkansas and Alabama, which have handed among the harshest anti-trans legal guidelines within the nation.

“That is the federal government deciding, not dad and mom deciding, what’s finest for college students,” Shannon McCay, founding father of the nonprofit He She Ze and We, told CBS 6. “In the event that they had been actually centering dad and mom on this coverage, then they’d consider dad and mom like me and all of the households I work with.”

The unique coverage was unveiled in 2022 and met with important backlash from college students, dad and mom, academics and LGBTQ advocates. The insurance policies will have an effect on more than 4,000 transgender students in Virginia. Throughout an in depth public remark course of, greater than 70,000 public comments had been submitted. Hundreds of scholars additionally organized school walkouts to protest the coverage.

In March, a transgender highschool pupil confronted Youngkin concerning the transphobic insurance policies throughout a CNN city corridor occasion. The coed, Niko, requested the governor if he thought that women at Niko’s highschool could be comfy sharing the toilet with him. Youngkin dodged the scholar’s query.

“Even for a Governor who has made his title out of producing political outrage on the backs of hardworking academics and harmless college students, the intentional concentrating on of LGBTQ+ college students in such a blatant and crass method within the title of ‘parental rights’ is an outrageous affront to decency,” Dr. James J. Fedderman, President of the Virginia Schooling Affiliation, said in an announcement.

VDOE’s anti-trans insurance policies stem from a 2020 state regulation which tasked the VDOE with creating mannequin insurance policies on transgender college students. Whereas the regulation was conceived to guard transgender college students and was celebrated as such, Youngkin, who ran on a “parental rights” and anti-“woke” campaign, weaponized the regulation in opposition to transgender youngsters. Analysis performed by the Trevor Project reveals that transgender youth who attend gender-affirming faculties are much less more likely to try suicide — that means that Youngkin’s endorsement of those polices could very effectively be a demise sentence for some trans youngsters.

“All faculty boards and superintendents ought to do not forget that no faculties are required to implement this administration-crafted coverage and may suppose twice earlier than contemplating this politically divisive debate and exposing themselves to intensive authorized legal responsibility,” Fedderman said. “If applied, these insurance policies would little question threaten the security and well-being of LGBTQ+ college students, open the door for bullying, and set again their current civil rights positive aspects in Virginia.”