Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, slammed her Democrat opponent, Abigail Spanberger, for refusing to condemn five Northern Virginia school districts whose transgender policies violate Title IX, as defined by the Trump administration.
“Abigail Spanberger will not give a simple answer: Will she join me in condemning these five school districts for violating Title IX, or will she stay silent while our children are put at risk?” Earle-Sears asked in a phone call with The Daily Signal Wednesday. “Parents want to know, I want to know.”
Spanberger did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the issue.
The five Northern Virginia counties have policies allowing boys who claim to identify as girls in the girls’ restroom and vice versa. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that these policies violate Title IX, a federal law barring discrimination on the basis of sex. The department announced last week that it would cut off most federal funding to the districts as a result.
The Loudoun 3
While the Trump administration found these school districts in violation of Title IX, one of the districts, Loudoun County Public Schools, opened a Title IX investigation into three boys who expressed shock at seeing a girl enter the boys’ locker room last March. While the school district dropped the case against one boy, who is Muslim, it kept the investigation into the other two boys, who are Christian.
Earlier this month, Loudoun County Public Schools determined that the two Christian boys had violated Title IX by engaging in sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination.
Earle-Sears called on Spanberger to help “the two boys in Loudoun County, who were punished because they simply said they were uncomfortable being forced to undress—because of violations of Title IX—with a biological female in a locker room.”
The Republican attacked the Democrat’s “opposition to common sense in general” on gender issues.
Earle-Sears noted that Spanberger, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against the Parents Bill of Rights Act in 2023 and for the Equality Act in 2021.
“She voted that biological men could be in bathrooms with our girls,” Earle-Sears said. “It’s crazy.”
Earle-Sears suggested that Spanberger would not allow boys in a locker room with her own daughters.
“She’s raising three girls in Virginia,” the Republican said of her Democrat opponent. “I cannot imagine that she would stand by and allow allow biological men to undress in the locker room with her three girls. I cannot imagine it.”
“It’s creating trauma in our children,” Earle-Sears concluded.
