PRESS RELEASE: DFI Files Civil Rights Complaint Against Maryland School District for Policy Requiring Boys and Girls to Share Locker Rooms in Violation of Title IX

Complaint details how boy who objected to sharing locker room with a girl was ‘laughed at’ and disciplined

WASHINGTON—The Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) announced today that it has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on behalf of a Maryland middle school student who was discriminated against by Carroll County Public Schools (CCPS) after he objected to sharing a locker room with a girl.

The complaint details how West Middle School in Westminster, Maryland, required a young boy and his male classmates to choose between changing their clothes in front of a girl in the boys’ locker room or missing significant class time and suffering the stigma of having to stand in a line to change in a single-stall bathroom, thus causing them to be late for class.

“Your primary duty as principal is to protect the safety, dignity, and privacy of all students. Instead, CCPS has chosen to elevate one student’s apparent preferences while disregarding the legal rights of others. Hiding behind a poorly designed policy while children are left to fend for themselves is not leadership. It is a failure of responsibility, plain and simple,” the boy’s parents wrote to the school’s principal after their repeated pleas for fair treatment went unanswered.

Despite multiple appeals from his parents, CCPS administrators rejected the boy’s request to use the locker room designated for his sex to change for PE class without a girl present.  School administrators cited the school district’s “gender identity” guidelines to justify their decision.

DFI’s complaint details how CCPS violates Title IX:

• CCPS’s policies allow students to use locker rooms and other intimate facilities based on each student’s chosen “gender identity” without regard to his or her biological sex. As a result, a girl who identifies as a boy has repeatedly used the boys’ locker room at West Middle School, thus forcing the complainant and other boys to dress and undress in front of the girl.
   
• As a condition of his participation in the educational programs and activities offered by CCPS, the school district requires the complainant to choose between undressing in front of a girl while using the boys’ locker room or waiting in line to do so in a single stall restroom, with the result that he has been late for class.
   
• Administrators have refused to remedy the hostile education environment created by the girl’s repeated, school-sanctioned intrusion into the boy’s private, single sex space at the school.
   
• By laughing at and dismissing the student’s privacy concerns, and even punishing him for questioning arbitrary rules imposed on him as a result of his objection to sharing a locker room with a girl, administrators retaliated against the student for asserting his Title IX rights.  

“To resolve this controversy, school officials had an easy choice: comply with federal law by prohibiting members of one sex to use the intimate facilities of the other sex or violate Title IX by sacrificing on the altar of gender identity ideology the privacy and dignity of their students. Inexplicably, school officials chose the latter,” said DFI’s President and Co-Founder Bob Eitel. “Their obstinate disregard for Title IX turned a student’s simple request—not to have to dress in front of a member of the opposite sex before P.E.—into a federal civil rights matter.”

DFI’s complaint asks OCR to investigate CCPS and require corrective action to restore the student’s equal access to educational programs and school facilities, end the school district’s retaliation, and bring its policies into compliance with Title IX.

To read the complaint, click here.