“I am vehemently in disagreement with their policy of allowing students who identify [as] a specific gender” to use single-sex spaces of their choice, a mother with two children at WSHS said anonymously to the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think identification of a gender is the point of private spaces.” “The situation is completely insane,” said Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a mother of two boys at WSHS. “This is happening across multiple schools in the district.” One case uncovered by the Washington Examiner involves a biological girl, identifying as a boy, using the boys’ locker rooms and competing on the boys’ cross country team at WSHS. Public social media posts show the family began transitioning the girl to a boy in 2017. First-day-of-school pictures went from smiles in pink dresses and pigtails with bows in her hair, to a child with a spiky, short haircut and baggy clothes. By 2018, the child was playing on a West Springfield Little League team as a boy. As a freshman, the student joined the boys’ cross country team, where the biological female placed 22nd out of 51 boys in the Varsity Boys’ 1000 Meter Run. Now a senior at WSHS, the student placed 35th out of 95 boys in the Boys’ 2500-meter race. Parents say the student has facial hair, and they had no idea the student was a biological female. “No parent wants to think about shared sex spaces in bathrooms and locker rooms,” Lundquist-Arora said. “So even for boys, that’s not, nobody’s comfortable with that.” “This is totally freaking crazy,” the WSHS mother said. “People should be incensed that an entire class of students is being forced to change with the opposite sex because that student decided, at whatever point, they want to change in that locker room.” In the second incident, a biological boy is allowed to use the female locker room even though he identifies as gay, not as transgender. When other female students began to complain on social media, an Instagram post shows the boy wrote, “I go in the girls’ bathroom for safety reasons, in the boys’ bathroom I’ve been threatened to be jumped multiple times, raped, and screamed at every time.” “In the girls’ bathroom, no one has ever said anything to me about how they are so uncomfortable,” the post continued. “My counselor and principal both said I’m allowed to go in there, I don’t even look at any of you, I go in a stall. You go to a public school, not everything is catered to you.” A WSHS father, who spoke with the Washington Examiner anonymously about the cases, said he felt the student’s response was ironic. “He wants to be completely catered to, his wants and desires, without concern of how other people may feel or think about what he does,” the WSHS father said. “From his statement, the underlying message is saying ‘I’m entitled to what I want. I don’t give a f*** what you think.’ I mean, that’s like the definition of irony, right?” Lundquist-Arora said she sees the situation as another indictment of the school system’s leaders. “I would say it makes me really distrust the leadership at the district level, because it’s a shame that a senior boy felt like he was being so bullied that he felt like he had to use the female bathroom,” Lundquist-Arora said. “That’s really, it’s really a terrible thing. You don’t want any kids being bullied for any reason.” “There’s so many things wrong with that entire situation,” the WSHS mother said. “Why are the women the ones who are sacrificing and being put in that kind of precarious position?” The current WSHS principal, James Patrick, started in June 2025. Parents expressed frustration that they have not heard from him about the controversies that have occurred under his leadership. “Patrick seems to be a super nice guy,” the WSHS mother said. “But I don’t know what his opinion is on all this, because we haven’t gotten anything from him.” “I’ve met the principal of West Springfield, I spoke with him, and I found him to be very nice,” the WSHS father said. “I don’t know if he’s not doing anything because his hands are tied because of [Fairfax County Superintendent] Michelle Reed, or is this like his personal decision to allow this to happen?” The Washington Examiner reached out to Patrick but did not receive a response. The third incident at WSHS involved a sophomore biological boy changing in the girls’ locker room for a physical education class. When the freshman girls complained to a teacher, saying they were uncomfortable getting undressed in front of a male, they were told to change faster or to find a single-use restroom. “How would I deal with it? I would be absolutely irate,” the WSHS father said. He has two sons enrolled in WSHS and a daughter who is not yet in high school. “Had my daughter been in that locker room when that boy was in there watching her change, like I can’t even fathom that situation. Nobody should be looking at my children, whether boys or girls, dressing or undressing, of the opposite gender.” “My friend was really upset that it was happening, that the school didn’t notify them,” Lundquist-Arora said of a mother with a daughter in the gym class. “Even now, that boy is still going into the girls locker room during that time, and they’ve told the girls to hurry up and change, some of them are using the private bathroom stalls, and now some teachers are being forced to accompany them while this is all happening.” “I don’t understand how the school itself is defending this,” the WSHS mother said. “How can they defend this student who was staring or otherwise making someone uncomfortable? That is sexual harassment in its most basic form.” Lundquist-Arora, who is also the Fairfax Chapter leader of IWF, explained there are five single-use bathrooms in WSHS and said the three students in question should be utilizing those facilities, rather than the single-sex bathrooms that don’t correspond with their biological sexes, instead of making the 2, 500 students of the school feel uncomfortable by sharing private, sex-separated spaces and wasting teacher’s time and resources to guard bathrooms. “This insanity needs to stop,” the WSHS mother said. “It doesn’t make sense that the very infinitely small percentage of the population should be protected, while the rest of the population should not.” Lundquist-Arora said many parents are complaining. “A lot of them didn’t even know that this was happening. They learned that their daughters were being subjected to a sophomore boy leering at them in the locker rooms from the evening news,” she said. “The school didn’t even send a message home, because district policy is not to notify parents.” These parents are not the only ones who want private spaces separated by biological sex. President Donald Trump and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) have placed federal and state mandates stating that failing to separate these spaces is a Title IX violation. Schools in several counties in Northern Virginia that have refused to change their open bathroom policies have been given a “high risk” status, meaning the districts must request reimbursement for federal funds instead of automatically receiving them. “I am really happy that Secretary McMahon has taken these steps to start putting them at high risk and taking funding away from them,” Lundquist-Arora said. “But in reality, Fairfax County has a $4 billion budget, and last year, federal funds were only $168 million. Granted, that is a decent amount of money. But the problem is that the current leadership of Fairfax County Public Schools seems happy to transfer that cost to the Fairfax County taxpayers through increases in local taxes.” The WSHS mother says cutting funding is not enough. She said those efforts represent a “drop in the bucket,” and she wants more drastic action. “I think people should be fired personally,” the WSHS mother said. “Have an emergency removal from the school board. They’re breaking state and federal laws and putting children at risk.” “Our taxes have gone up in the last 10 or 11 years by 66%,” another Fairfax County mother told the Washington Examiner. “It’s crazy.” She used to have children at West Springfield High School and still lives in the area. When she saw what they were being taught in public school during the COVID-19 pandemic, she pulled her children out of public school and placed them in private schools. “There was a video about a mosquito, and it was basically a racist video saying how white people are to be hated, and they’re the aggressors and oppressors,” the Fairfax County mother said. “You had school board members trying to change the 911 curriculum to be softer and to not call these Islamic radicals terrorists. My older kids were given these nonsense short stories. They were teaching about Jim Crow laws and in the Reconstruction era of history, about a trans man who cross-dressed as a woman, who was in prison. They were given this as part of the curriculum.” When it comes to cutting funding, she is not sure this is the way to punish the schools for their bathroom policies and worries it could cost Republicans politically. On the other hand, the WSHS father said money talks, and he cannot think of any other consequences for these schools. CULTURE ISSUES TRIED IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION WITH VIRGINIA ELECTION “I think it’s fair to withhold funding because the school is in violation of these mandates,” the WSHS dad said. “What other recourse is there at a state level or a federal level? I feel when it comes to government programs, funding is always kind of the crux. In my opinion, withholding funding is kind of the only recourse at the state level they would have.” Most of the parents who spoke with the Washington Examiner are calling for the firing of Fairfax County Superintendent Michelle Reed, who is spearheading the fight against these federal mandates, which are causing the schools to lose funds, as well as for simply not having their children’s best interests at heart.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/videos/3860271/insanity-needs-to-stop-transgender-bathroom-cases-fairfax-county/
‘This insanity needs to stop’: Parents frustrated as three transgender bathroom cases unfold at one Fairfax County school
