A Virginia school district is punishing two male students for expressing discomfort with the presence of a biological female in the boys’ locker room.

Earlier this year, Loudoun County Public Schools launched a Title IX investigation into three male students at Stone Bridge High School after a female student, who identifies as male, entered the boys’ locker room and filmed them while they expressed their discomfort with her presence. The female student alleged that the three boys made “disparaging comments and physical threats.” 

A law firm representing the students, Founding Freedoms Law Center, said in a statement Monday that LCPS has decided to suspend two students for 10 days for their alleged Title IX violations.

The students will also be given a no-contact order for their accuser and will be required to meet with school administrators to craft a corrective action plan. 

The school district previously dropped the charges against one of the three students, who is Muslim, but continued to investigate the other two students, who are Christian. One of the two students, who had disciplinary action taken against him, is leaving the state, as his family has decided to move back to North Dakota. However, LCPS said that if they return to Virginia and send him back to an LCPS school, the punishment against him will take effect then.

The president of the Founding Freedoms Law Center, Victoria Cobb, said, “We’ve seen time and time again that Loudoun County, if given the opportunity to do the right thing, will instead do the wrong thing. LCPS once again shows it is willing to harm students in the name of woke ideology.”

“To punish boys who complain that a biological girl is in their changing area is a top-down effort to normalize unacceptable privacy invasions,” she added. The firm said it is “actively preparing next steps to defend these boys.”

A spokesman for LCPS, Dan Adams, did not comment on the report, telling the Sun, “It is the general practice of LCPS not to publicly discuss private student matters.”

The school district has previously said that media outlets were “misrepresenting” the facts of the case, but has declined to state what information has been distorted. 

The mother of the student who is leaving the state, Renae Smith, previously told the Sun that she worried that an adverse finding in the investigation could harm his college application process.

“When you hear somebody was charged with sexual harassment for, you know, a girl being in the [boys’] locker room, it doesn’t make a lot of sense logically, so people say, ‘That doesn’t make sense. Something else must’ve happened.’ And so, of course, rumors spread, and that affects his reputation.”

She noted that colleges most likely will not look at the “context” of why someone was found responsible for sexual harassment.

The LCPS investigation has been labeled a “misuse of authority” by Virginia’s attorney general, Jason Miyares, and the school district has been accused of religious discrimination.

Mr. Miyares’s office investigated LCPS over its Title IX claim and failed to find “any outside corroboration” of the claim that the male students made threats or harassing comments.

The investigation also found that the female student previously filed a “false or unfounded Title IX complaint” against two of the students under investigation for the locker room encounter and questioned LCPS’s ability to detect false complaints.

Mr. Miyares referred the LCPS investigation to the federal government and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, as well as the Department of Justice, for further investigation.