The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a June 14 Title IX complaint against a Wisconsin public school district after a ‘trans female’ student exposed himself to four minor female students in a high school’s locker room shower. Title IX bars sex discrimination in education:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
According to the complaint, sexual harassment under Title IX includes “[u]nwelcome conduct determined by a reasonable person to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the recipient’s education program or activity.”
WILL filed the complaint against the Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD) “as an interested third-party organization with clients whose daughter was discriminated against on the basis of sex” because of the shower incident, which the complaint details:
On March 3, 2023, four freshman girls at SPASD participated in a swim unit as part of their gym class. After class, the girls entered the girls’ athletic locker room to shower before their next class. Upon entering, they noticed an 18-year-old senior male student in the area of the lockers and benches. While the girls were shocked to see him in the locker room, they had a general idea that the student identifies as transgender. Even though they were uncomfortable, they proceeded to the shower area and began to rinse off with their swimsuits on, which was their = usual practice.As the girls began to shower, the male student approached them, entered the shower area, announced “I’m trans, by the way,” and then fully undressed and showered next to the girls. He was initially turned towards the wall but turned and fully exposed his body to the four girls. He had not transitioned medically and had the physiological appearance of an adult male. Understandably, the girls closed their eyes and tried to hurry up and leave the showers.
The complaint accuses the district of not following Title IX procedures by failing “to offer supportive measures or an opportunity to file a formal complaint of sexual harassment until after WILL became involved.”
The district’s alleged failures include not interviewing one of the four girls even after becoming aware of her identity and failure to report a possible criminal act because an adult exposed himself to minors.
One of the girls relayed the experience to “another student, who subsequently informed student services about the incident.” The complaint alleges the school’s assistant principal failed to pass the sexual harassment report on to the Title IX coordinator as required by law.
When the uninvolved student later received permission to provide the names of the four girls to student services, “the assistant principal told the student that the girls can instead approach [the assistant principal] if they wanted,” according to the complaint.
When WILL asked why the district never interviewed one of the girls, the district allegedly replied that an interview was unnecessary because “the investigation had already established the facts of what occurred.”
The complaint accuses the district of failing to resolve the concerns of parents who inquired about the school’s locker-room use policy, with the district allegedly only producing a “Restroom and Locker Room Accessibility Guidance” policy more than a month after the incident on April 20, 2023. The complaint alleges the policy “by all accounts was never adopted by the school board.”
According to a response from the district, “[t]he language in that document was in effect at the time of the incident. It is a part of the district’s transgender guidelines document which dates to 2017.”
The “Restroom and Locker Room Accessibility Guidance” document, which quotes Title IX, describes how the district will handle restroom and locker-room conflicts arising out of use by trans students:
A student who is transgender, nonbinary, or gender expansive will be permitted to access the men’s/women’s segregated restrooms in accordance with the student’s gender identity that the student regularly asserts at school and in other social environments.
The document calls for assessing requests “on a case-by-case basis” to further the goals of facilitating access to the “curriculum and other relevant programs,” providing “adequate student privacy and safety” and reducing “stigmatization of the transgender student.”
According to the document, requests must be considered in light of “[t]he physical layout of the facility and the degree of undress required when changing for the applicable activity . . . in making the arrangements.”
The document continues, however, that “[t]here is no absolute rule that, in all cases, will require a transgender student to access and use only the locker rooms and other changing areas that correspond to the biological sex the student was assigned at birth.”
A letter from WILL to the district on April 19, 2023, called on the district “to address this [incident] immediately and put policies in place that will protect the safety and privacy of all students” and called “the response by the District to date . . . completely inadequate.” The letter made extensive document requests of the district.
A response to WILL’s request for documents, dated May 10, 2023, provided several requested documents but refused to produce others until WILL pre-payed more than $11,000 in costs estimated to produce the remaining documents.
Counsel for SPASD declined to comment on the Title IX complaint.
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