PRESS RELEASE: DFI Files Title IX Complaint Against Minnesota Education Department and Two Public School Districts for Forcing Girls to Share Intimate Facilities with Boys

WASHINGTON—Today, the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), and Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) for violations of Title IX. The complaint highlights the entities’ coercive “gender identity” policies that force students to share locker rooms, bathrooms, and overnight sleeping quarters with members of the opposite sex.

These policies, implemented under the guise of “inclusion,” erase sex-based protections in federal law, compelling students to sacrifice their dignity, privacy, and safety as a condition of participating in school programs and activities. DFI calls on OCR to investigate these violations and, if necessary, terminate federal financial assistance for MDE, MPS, and SPPS for engaging in sex-based discrimination.

“A recipient of federal financial assistance cannot demand that students disregard their biological sex and related privacy interest in sex-separated intimate facilities as the price of participation in the recipient’s educational program or activity,” the complaint states.

The complaint lists several examples of Title IX violations happening in public schools across the state. In June 2024, the Minneapolis Board of Education adopted a “Gender Inclusion” policy that mandates student access to sex-separated facilities based on self-asserted gender identity rather than biological sex. As cited in the complaint, the policy provided that “[a]ll students shall have access to gendered facilities and school-sponsored programs that are consistent with the student’s gender identity,” and “[i]n no case shall any student be required to use a restroom that conflicts with the student’s gender identity.” Such facilities include, and are not limited to, “multi-stalled gendered restrooms, locker rooms, and school programs, trips, and athletic programs.”

This policy requires no individualized assessment of the privacy or safety interests of other students and forces objecting students to change their schedules or use separate facilities.

DFI also highlights a similarly extreme policy in Saint Paul, where students on school trips are assigned roommates based on gender identity rather than sex: “Students shall be roomed on overnight field trips, for which students will be separated based on gender, with other students of their same gender as listed on the District’s student information system.”

In practice, this means girls must share bedrooms with boys who identify as female, if so listed in the district system.

“These agencies are in gross violation of federal civil rights law,” said DFI President and Co-Founder Bob Eitel. “No child should be forced to share a bathroom, locker room, or overnight sleeping accommodation with the opposite sex as a condition of his or her participation in a federally funded education program or activity. Congress enacted Title IX to bar discrimination in education on the basis of sex, not gender identity. These policies gut those protections.”

To read the full complaint, click here.