The U.S. Education Department said Thursday that Denver Public Schools violated Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination in education by creating all-gender bathrooms and allowing students to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity.
The finding followed an unprecedented probe of Denver’s East High School that marked a sharp departure from the department’s investigations under former Democratic President Joe Biden. It’s part of a push by President Donald Trump’s Republican administration against local and state policies that make allowances for transgender students.
The investigation in Denver began after the school district converted a girl’s restroom into an all-gender restroom while leaving another bathroom on the same floor exclusive to boys in January. The school district has said that was done as a result of a student-led process and the bathroom had 12-foot (3.6-meter) tall partitions for privacy and security.
The school district later added a second all-gender restroom on the same floor which it said was meant to address concerns of unfairness. At the time it said that students would also continue to have access to gender-specific restrooms and single-stall, all-gender bathrooms.
The Education Department said it offered the school district a chance to voluntarily make changes, including converting multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms back to ones designated by gender, within 10 days or risk unspecified enforcement action.
It also wants the district to use biology-based definitions for the words “male” and “female” in all policies and practices related to Title IX and to rescind any policies or guidance allowing students to use bathrooms based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
“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,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, said in a news release.
Denver Public Schools officials said they had received the results of the investigation and were “determining our next steps.”
You could drive a truck through the partition gaps in the gendered toilets at my office.