There Is A Difference.

When you buck the governor there is a difference between standing up against a policy that exclude people and a policy that is inclusive.

Some Virginia school districts rejecting governor's policy on transgender bathrooms, preferred pronouns

Under the new guidelines, students must receive parental permission to be referred to by a different name or gender

Fox News

By Landon Mion

July 26, 2023

Several school districts in Virginia said they would be rejecting Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin's model policies requiring students to use bathrooms and pronouns that match their biological sex.

The updated Virginia Department Of Education’s 2023 Model Policies include "clear and useful" suggestions to school districts for preferred pronoun usage, maintaining student records, the identification of students and enforcing sex-based dress codes.

Under the new guidelines, students must use bathrooms and other private facilities that correspond with their biological sex instead of gender identity unless required by federal law. Students are also required to receive parental permission to be referred to by a different name or gender.

Alexandria City Public School’s Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt and School Board Chair Michelle Rief released a joint statement on Monday saying they were "dismayed" when Youngkin introduced the policies on transgender students, ALXnow reported. This is the second straight year that the district has rejected the policies, which are updated annually.

"[W]e want to reaffirm our commitment to all students, staff and families, including our LGBTQIA+ community, that ACPS will continue to both implement and develop gender affirming policies for all ACPS students," the statement reads. "School Board Policy JB: Nondiscrimination in Education protects students from discrimination due to gender expression, gender identity, sexual harassment and transgender status."

Of course the governor and the Virginia Department of Education, are shall we say “a little upset” over the school districts not following the exclusionary policy.

Truthout wrote that,

Arlington Public Schools has announced that they will refuse to comply with the Virginia Department of Education’s (VDOE) discriminatory policies toward transgender students in the state, which were finalized by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) last week.

“We have reviewed the model policies and determined that our current policies and policy implementation procedures that protect the rights of our transgender students will stay as is,” the Arlington Public Schools superintendent, Dr. Francisco Durán, wrote in a letter released on July 20.

The VDOE “model policies” bar transgender students from school sports and from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Under the new policies, teachers would also be forced to refer to students by the name and pronouns on their official record, effectively forcing them to misgender many of their students.

Of course we all know why the Virginia Department of Education is forcing a discriminatory policy on the state school systems.

VDOE’s anti-trans policies stem from a 2020 state law which tasked the VDOE with creating model policies on transgender students. While the law was conceived to protect transgender students and was celebrated as such, Youngkin, who ran on a “parental rights” and anti-“woke” campaign, weaponized the law against transgender kids. Research conducted by the Trevor Project shows that transgender youth who attend gender-affirming schools are less likely to attempt suicide — meaning that Youngkin’s endorsement of these polices may very well be a death sentence for some trans kids.

Then we have the Supreme Court ruling of Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board which the VDOE has conveniently forgotten.

Federal Court Sides with Gavin Grimm, Affirming that Federal Law Protects Transgender Students

Case: Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board

Affiliate: ACLU of Virginia

May 22, 2018

A federal court today denied the Gloucester County School Board’s motion to dismiss a case brought by former student Gavin Grimm, holding that Title IX and the Constitution protect transgender students from being excluded from the common restrooms that align with their gender identity.

The court directed the parties to schedule a settlement conference within 30 days. The case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Virginia.

Joshua Block, senior staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT &HIV Project, had this reaction:

“The district court’s ruling vindicates what Gavin has been saying from the beginning. Federal law protects Gavin and other students who are transgender from being stigmatized and excluded from using the same common restrooms that other boys and girls use. These sorts of discriminatory policies do nothing to protect privacy and only serve to harm and humiliate transgender students.”

Have you noticed that the Republicans have selective amnesia.

NPR wrote…

By a 5-to-4 vote, a coalition of conservative and liberal justices reaffirmed the court's 1986 precedent interpreting how legislative districts must be drawn under the landmark voting rights act, as amended in 1982. The court said that in Alabama, a state where there are seven congressional seats and one in four voters is black, the Republican-dominated state legislature had denied African American voters a reasonable chance to elect a second representative of their choice.

Which Alabama has ignored. Then we have an article in the Cleveland.com website.

Ohio Republicans have ignored an Ohio Supreme Court order to approve a new state legislative district map, with a court-ordered Friday morning deadline passing without any official action from the GOP-controlled redistricting commission.

The move makes clear that with a federal court ruling securing their preferred maps for this year’s elections, Republicans plan to ignore the state judiciary’s attempts to enforce the language of redistricting reforms -- while waiting for a more favorable Supreme Court makeup following the November election.

Republicans thumb their noses at court rulings that they don’t like.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of the Virginia DOE… how will they handle the insurrection to their draconian and possible illegal policy.