The Department of Education (DOE) has opened an investigation into an incident at a Wisconsin school involving a transgender woman student in a locker room with female students.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm, announced this week that it received a letter from the DOE saying that the department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) was opening an investigation into a complaint it filed earlier this year involving a transgender student who undressed in front of female students in the Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD).
Newsweek reached out to the DOE via email for comment. “Following the school’s failure to sufficiently address the incident, disregard for parents’ concerns, and their stonewalling of an open records request,
WILL worked alongside parents of the school district to seek an investigation and remedies from the Department of Education under the Biden Administration,” the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty [WILL] said in a press release on Thursday.
“The federal government notified WILL that in response to our complaint they are opening an investigation of SPASD.” WILL Deputy Counsel Daniel Lennington told Newsweek on Thursday:
“This opening of a formal civil rights investigation is tremendously significant, not only for this case, but as a warning to other schools nationwide that embrace new and untested transgender policies without considering the impact on female students.”
According to the WILL, in June, it filed a complaint with the DOE after learning that an 18-year-old transgender woman student undressed in front of four female high school students in a locker room.
“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,” the complaint said.
“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.”
