The Department of Education (ED) announced on Thursday that a Colorado School District violated Title IX by converting a high school girls’ restroom into an “all-gender” restroom and by allowing students to access facilities that match their “gender identity.”
The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found Denver Public Schools (DPS) in violation of Title IX’s prohibition against sex discrimination after launching an investigation into the district in January. The department initiated the probe after a local report alleged that the district had converted a girls’ restroom in East High School to a multi-stall “all-gender” restroom, leaving the second floor with a restroom exclusively for male students and no restroom exclusively for female students.
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement:
Denver Public Schools violated Title IX and its implementing regulations by converting a sex-segregated restroom designated for girls in East High School to an ‘all-gender’ facility and by allowing students to use the high school’s intimate facilities on the basis of their ‘gender identity’ rather than their biological sex. As a result, the District is creating a hostile environment for its students by endangering their safety, privacy, and dignity while denying them access to equal educational activities and opportunities.
“Denver is free to endorse a self-defeating gender ideology, but it is not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students in violation of Title IX,” he added. “The Trump Administration will work relentlessly to hold accountable school districts that harbor the ideological fanatics and policies that sully students’ educational experience with sex discrimination.”
ED said DPS “sought to rectify” the situation by converting a boys’ restroom on the second floor to an “all gender” facility as well, but the department said that action “does not remedy its violation of Title IX because males are still allowed to invade sensitive female-only facilities.”
The department alleged that the school had received several complaints, including from a female student who reported that when her friend used the restroom, “boys kept staring at her, looking her up and down, kind of taunting her.”
“The student further shared that she was ‘very uncomfortable’ with boys ‘being together in the same bathroom as [girls],’ stating ‘our privacy and our rights has [sic] just been taken away,’” ED said in a press release. “Multiple students and parents expressed concerns about sexual assault and privacy in their complaints, and one complainant shared that ‘the female students are very uncomfortable with a male teacher going in frequently [to the restroom] to check on things…it should be a female teacher.”’
OCR additionally found an online document linked to several school websites called “Denver Public Schools LGBTQ+ Toolkit,” which stated that “transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students have the right to use facilities…that match their gender as consistently expressed at school.”
“These policies violate Title IX by allowing males to invade sensitive female-only spaces (and vice versa),” ED said.
The department said OCR issued a proposed Resolution Agreement to DPS to resolve the alleged violations in ten days. DPS “risk[s] imminent enforcement action” if they do not agree to the resolution, the department said.
The resolution would require DPS to re-designate multi-stall “all gender” restrooms into sex-designated multi-stall restrooms, rescind guidance allowing students to access intimate facilities based on “gender identity,” issue a memo to all district schools reiterating that schools must provide intimate facilities based on sex and that females may not be discriminated against, and “adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ in all policies and practices related to Title IX,” ED said.
In a comment to Breitbart News, DPS said it had “just received the findings from the Office for Civil Rights for case number 08-25-5901 and is determining our next steps.”
Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity as a condition of receiving federal funding.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
