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The Trump administration is spoiling for a fight over civil rights in Virginia schools. And even if the state’s Democrats manage to avoid it, the clash offers a template that Republicans could use nationwide next year.
Much of the tension between the administration and Virginia districts stems from President Donald Trump’s early executive orders that the US government recognize only “two sexes, male and female.” The Department of Education threatened on Tuesday to withhold federal funding for five public school districts — all in DC’s shadow, all strongly Democratic — over their policies letting students use sex-specific facilities “based on ‘gender identity.’”
But the Virginia education fight is bigger in suburban Fairfax County, where the Justice Department has investigated since May whether a top-ranked school “discriminated against Asian students” by changing its admissions policy to a more “holistic” one.
Republican candidates in Virginia’s critical off-year elections are encouraging, and often running on, these federal interventions, which Trump also turned into a potent campaign issue last year. While Virginia Democratic candidates have treated them as a distraction, the administration’s allegations of states’ civil rights violations fold into campaigns the GOP is already running across the country.
Since January, the Department of Education has opened civil rights investigations under the education law known as Title IX in Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, and New York — all states where Democrats control the governor’s office, making each probe a political challenge.
In New York, the investigation began in response to a letter from GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is expected to run for governor next year against Gov. Kathy Hochul. In Maine, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills clashed with Trump over gender policy at a White House meeting; Mills is a top potential recruit to challenge GOP Sen. Susan Collins next year.
But it’s in Virginia — where Republicans had their first political success drawing out Democrats on issues of race, gender, and schools — where the Trump administration’s civil rights investigations have made the biggest splash.
Spokespeople for the DOJ and the Education Department did not respond to questions about how local politics played into decisions about what to investigate.
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The Fairfax race-based civil rights case was referred to the DOJ by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican who is seeking reelection in November. And the funding fight in northern Virginia is giving the GOP fodder not only in the November gubernatorial election, but in the Sept. 9 special election to replace the late Rep. Gerry Connolly in a Fairfax district that Democrats usually win easily.
“They’re going to lose $160 million of federal funding,” Stewart Whitson, the GOP nominee for the Fairfax congressional seat, said at a Monday candidate forum. “What are they doing that for? They’re fighting to give boys the right to be in girls’ locker rooms.”
Democrats have been more cautious, seeking to wall off the investigations as culture-war bait in order to focus on the pocketbook issues they’re trying to run on. They speculate that the Trump administration is using its vast authority to open civil rights investigations or withhold funding from school districts for electoral gain.
As Whitson’s Democratic opponent, Fairfax County supervisor James Walkinshaw, replied at the Monday forum: “The Trump administration hand-picked a handful of school districts because, like Stewart, they virulently cannot stand Democrats.”
In a statement to Semafor, a spokesman for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger’s campaign said that the Democrat’s “priority is making sure Virginia’s kids are safe and supported,” adding that “Abigail believes these decisions are best made at the local level with local parental input.”
The spokesman further criticized her GOP opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, as bringing “a decades-long record of trying to defund Virginia’s public schools” to the race with no serious plan to improve student achievement.
Meanwhile, Republicans have plunged into the fray, trying to replicate Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s successful 2021 campaign against race-sensitive and gender-inclusive policies in northern Virginia schools.
A female student’s claim of sexual assault by a boy who followed her into a women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School helped propel the GOP to victory that year when it linked the incident to the Loudoun County school board’s endorsement of gender-neutral bathrooms.
On Monday, Stone Bridge High School suspended two male students who made fun of a trans student who chose to use the boys’ locker room and filmed part of their reaction.
Earle-Sears said the suspension was exactly what the Department of Education was trying to stop.
“They haven’t gotten the message,” Earle-Sears said on Wednesday, after arriving at a rally outside the school. “We’re going to send them a message again!”
The View From Loudoun County
Coverage of the Trump policy in northern Virginia has been driven by a DC-area ABC News affiliate owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, which has included it in a national project dubbed “Crisis in the Classroom.”
Station reporter Nick Minock, who ran a package about Spanberger’s refusal to say whether she supports “biological males competing in women’s sports,” has followed the story for years — after working as a deputy press secretary in the Department of Transportation during Trump’s first term.
Democrats see that reporting as an outlier, not a trend-setter. Even as a poll this week from Roanoke College found Earle-Sears gaining ground on Spanberger, largely by consolidating Republican support, they’re sticking to their bet that the GOP is overinvesting in the issue.
Last week, when Spanberger unveiled her “Strengthening Virginia Schools” plan, no reporter at the event asked about the Title IX investigations or any story related to them.
David’s view
What’s most notable about the Virginia fight over Title IX isn’t that the Trump administration is aggressively applying it against liberal school boards. The Biden administration’s own interpretation of the law, which expanded it to include protections for gender identity, was challenged by red states and thrown out by a conservative judge before Trump took office.
The real news here is how plainly Democratic candidates are sidestepping the gauntlet that Trump’s administration has thrown. Outside of the deepest-blue areas, the party doesn’t want to elevate stories that point to potential federal overreach against local schools.
That’s in part because Democrats expect that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will continue to side with Republicans and the Trump administration, as it did when it upheld Tennessee’s ban on hormone therapy for trans youth.
And Democrats are also somewhat confident that voters don’t care as much about the topic as Republicans do. Four years ago, the GOP ran on a tangle of education issues: COVID lockdowns and learning loss, inclusive race and gender policies, declining test scores, and “equity” proposals that critics said could lead to lower-achieving schools.
This year, Spanberger is running on higher school funding, arguing that Republicans have let standards slip. Implicit in that is the idea that only one party is obsessed with gender and race — and it’s not the Democrats.
“The Democratic theory of the case is that the environment is so good and their position heading into the fall so strong that they don’t need to wade into those issues and they can just keep the campaign to the fundamentals,” Republican strategist Tucker Martin, who is not working for a statewide GOP campaign, told me.
One problem with that strategy: Democrats have sometimes lulled themselves into denial about race and gender politics. Every Republican ad-maker learned from 2024 that the party is vulnerable there. They see no signs that Democrats have learned how to counter more “she’s for they/them” ads without alienating progressives, who worry that the party will abandon them to win votes.
Room for Disagreement
LGBTQ rights groups, which have endorsed Virginia’s Democratic ticket, have had no problem with the muted Democratic response to the Trump administration’s Title IX investigations. In fact, they describe the fight as one example of a broader trend rather than a crisis unto itself.
“Virginia voters want leaders who will push back against the Republican Party’s extreme agenda and blatant civil rights violations,” said Narissa Rahaman, executive director of Equality Virginia Advocates. “The recent attacks on immigrant communities and school districts by the Trump administration, with support from Governor Youngkin, are a prime example of federal overreach that we are already seeing pop up on the campaign trail.”
Notable
In K-12 Dive, Naaz Moden looks at how the Supreme Court decision on gender medicine is being used to bolster the Trump administration’s other gender policy moves. From one Ed announcement: “The Supreme Court acknowledged that a person’s identification as ‘transgender’ is distinct from a person’s ‘biological sex.’”
In The 19th, Mel Leonor Barclay asks whether Spanberger can “reset” education politics for Democrats. The candidate’s take: “As a parent, my heart goes out to the parents who are just trying to do right by their kids and don’t want to see their kids at the center of a political back and forth, or a political punching bag.”
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