Virginia
Loudoun supervisor demands report on boy charged with assault in girl’s bathroom
Controversy over false reports that student was ‘gender fluid’ continues
A member of the Loudoun County, Va., Board of Supervisors has threatened to call for the withholding of funds from the county’s school system unless school officials release a report they hired a law firm to prepare as part of an investigation into the school system’s handling of two sexual assaults committed by a 15-year-old boy who was incorrectly identified as “gender fluid.”
When reports surfaced last October that the boy allegedly committed one of the two assaults in the girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Va., in May 2021 while wearing a skirt, the revelation triggered a furious backlash against Virginia’s statewide transgender school policy that had been adopted by Loudoun County.
The policy, which is based on LGBTQ nondiscrimination legislation passed by the Virginia General Assembly, allows transgender and gender fluid students to use the bathroom and other school facilities that conform to their gender identity.
Loudoun school officials apologized for their handling of the two sexual assault incidents and commissioned an independent investigation by a law firm after news surfaced that they transferred the boy to another high school after he was charged in the first sexual assault without alerting the other school of the charges pending against him. The boy was charged with sexually assaulting another girl in a vacant classroom on Oct. 6, 2021, at Broad Run High School, also in Ashburn.
Loudoun school officials have declined to release the report conducted by the law firm Blankingship & Keith, saying to do so would violate attorney-client privilege and would release information about individuals involved in the sexual assault cases. The identity of the 15-year-old boy charged in the two cases and the two girls he allegedly assaulted have been withheld because they are considered juveniles under Virginia law.
But Loudoun County Supervisor Caleb Kershner, who is an attorney whose law firm represented the 15-year-old boy when his case came before a juvenile court judge last year and in January of this year, has demanded that the report be released.
He told WTOP News that in an upcoming joint meeting in February of the Board of Supervisors and the Loudoun County School Board, he would raise the issue of withholding school funding unless school officials release the report.
“Loudoun County Public Schools needs to keep our students safe, and parents need assurances that the mistake made by the LCPS and by the Commonwealth’s Attorney will never occur again,” he told WTOP. He was referring to concerns raised that the Commonwealth’s Attorney, who serves as the county prosecutor, also mishandled the case involving the teenager.
“The Board of Supervisors will be starting our budget process with LCPS this month, and I will be asking LCPS to release their independent sexual assault report as a condition of funding,” WTOP quoted him as saying.
In a little-noticed article last November, the British publication DailyMail.com published an interview with the 15-year-old boy’s mother, who said her son identifies as heterosexual and as a male, not as gender fluid or transgender.
LGBTQ activists have said the backlash against both the Virginia and Loudoun County transgender non-discrimination policies was fueled by what they have said all along was unsubstantiated claims that the boy was transgender or gender fluid.
His mother told DailyMail.com that her son occasionally wore a skirt “because it gave him attention he desperately needed and sought,” but he wore jeans and male clothes most of the time. She pointed out that law enforcement authorities disclosed that her son and the girl he was charged with assaulting in the school’s girl’s bathroom had consenting sex in the bathroom twice before the alleged assault.
Kershner’s call for the release of the school report on the two sexual assault incidents came three days before Loudoun County Juvenile Court Chief Judge Pamela Brooks reversed an earlier decision to place the 15-year-old boy on the Virginia sex offender registry for life.
WTOP News reports that the judge’s reversal of her earlier order placing the boy on the sex offender registry came in response to arguments by Kershner and members of Kirshner’s own law firm representing the boy at a Jan. 27 hearing. The lawyers argued that a sex offender registry designation should be limited to adults rather than a juvenile and would be harmful to the juvenile justice system’s objective of rehabilitation for juvenile offenders.
Brooks left in place her earlier decision on Jan. 12 to sentence the boy to supervised probation in a locked juvenile rehabilitation center until his 18th birthday, WTOP News reported.
Democrats on Tuesday increased their majority in the Virginia House of Delegates.
The Associated Press notes the party now has 61 seats in the chamber. Democrats before Election Day had a 51-48 majority in the House.
All six openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual candidates — state Dels. Rozia Henson (D-Prince William County), Laura Jane Cohen (D-Fairfax County), Joshua Cole (D-Fredericksburg), Marcia Price (D-Newport News), Adele McClure (D-Arlington County), and Mark Sickles (D-Fairfax County) — won re-election.
Lindsey Dougherty, a bisexual Democrat, defeated state Del. Carrie Coyner (R-Chesterfield County) in House District 75 that includes portions of Chesterfield and Prince George Counties. (Attorney General-elect Jay Jones in 2022 texted Coyner about a scenario in which he shot former House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican.)
Other notable election results include Democrat John McAuliff defeating state Del. Geary Higgins (R-Loudoun County) in House District 30. Former state Del. Elizabeth Guzmán beat state Del. Ian Lovejoy (R-Prince William County) in House District 22.
Democrats increased their majority in the House on the same night they won all three statewide offices: governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general.
Narissa Rahaman is the executive director of Equality Virginia Advocates, the advocacy branch of Equality Virginia, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group, last week noted the election results will determine the future of LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom, and voting rights in the state.
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2024 signed a bill that codified marriage equality in state law.
The General Assembly earlier this year approved a resolution that seeks to repeal the Marshall-Newman Amendment that defines marriage in the state constitution as between a man and a woman. The resolution must pass in two successive legislatures before it can go to the ballot.
Shreya Jyotishi contributed to this article.
Virginia
Gay Republican loses race for Virginia lieutenant governor
John Reid became first out nominee for statewide office in Va.
John Reid, a gay conservative former radio talk show host in Richmond for many years, lost his race as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia on Tuesday, falling short of becoming the state’s first openly gay person to win a statewide office.
According to the Virginia Board of Elections, with votes counted in 129 of the state’s 133 localities, Democrat Ghazala F. Hashmi, a member of the Virginia State Senate, captured 55.45 percent of the vote, with 1,822,889 votes compared to Reid, who received 44.30 percent with 1,456,335 votes.
The election board results at 11:30 p.m. on election night also showed there were 8,391 write-in votes cast in the lieutenant governor’s race at 0.26 percent.
While Reid fell short of becoming Virginia’s first out LGBTQ statewide office holder, Hashmi broke another barrier by becoming both the state and the nation’s first Muslim woman elected to a statewide office.
The Progressive Voters Guide has reported that Hashmi supports LGBTQ rights as part of a broader progressive agenda that includes public education, reproductive rights, and environmental justice.
Gay longtime Virginia State Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) endorsed Hashmi’s candidacy and told the Washington Blade he recently took her on a campaign tour of the Del Ray section of Alexandria.
In an interview with the Blade in April, Reid responded to a question of what message he had for LGBTQ voters in Virginia.
“Well, the thing I would say to gay voters who are looking and examining the candidates, is that I was out of the closet as a gay Republican publicly in very difficult rooms where people weren’t accepting of gay men – long before Donald Trump said I don’t care about this stuff,” he said.
“So even though I’m a Republican I know some people in the LGBT community are reflexively hostile to Republicans,” he told the Blade, “I took that step in public, and I think I helped change a lot of minds within the Republican Party and within central Virginia, which continues to be pretty conservative place, by being true to who I am.”
Former state Del. Jay Jones on Tuesday defeated incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares in the state’s attorney general race.
Miyares, a Republican who was a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, has been attorney general since 2022. Miyares lost to his Democratic challenger by a 46.8-52.8 percent margin.
Miyares in a 2023 letter to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin said school districts must adhere to the state’s new guidelines for transgender and nonbinary students that activists say could potentially out them. Miyares also joined other state attorneys general who challenged the Biden-Harris administration’s Title IX rules that specifically protected LGBTQ students from discrimination based on their gender identity and sexual orientation.
Youngkin and Miyares earlier this year launched an investigation into how Loudoun County Public Schools has handled the case of three male high school students who complained about a transgender student in a boys’ locker room.
The election took place weeks after screenshots of Jones texting a colleague about a scenario in which he shot former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican.
Shreya Jyotishi contributed to this article.
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