Grayson County School Board in Virginia unanimously passed an ordinance to prohibit students from using bathrooms not in accordance with their birth genders, in defiance of the federal directive recently sent to schools across the nation by the Obama administration.
"It wasn't the politics of just the Republican side ... it was a lot of people on the other side of the fence too [who] are really having concerns with who has access to the bathrooms," district superintendent Kelly Wilmore told LifeSite News.
The ordinance allows students to use a separate facility but does not permit them to use bathrooms that do not correspond to their sex at birth.
"I hate to see anybody get singled out, but I want to see them safe, too," said Wilmore. "I love all the kids, whether we have a kid that's straight, gay, transgender, it doesn't matter."
The federal directive states that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which protects students against discrimination based on sex, will also be treated as a clause that protects against discrimination based on gender identity. In the directive, the Department of Education and Department of Justice stated they would "treat a student's gender identity as the student's sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations."
Schools that do not comply with this directive risk losing federal funding.
The school board said that they took the measure under pressure of parents who said they would pull their kids out of school system as they did not feel the new bathroom regulation was safe.
"Setting aside the fact that I'm a legislator, I'm a parent first, and my main concern, my main reason of moving forward was to protect my child," said State Senator Bill Carrico who advised the school board.
Wilmore said that the school has not received a single negative response from his constituents since they approved the ordinance.
"We want to protect the innocence of our children, so we felt like they should respect our choices," said Pastor David Osborne.
Eleven states have filed a federal lawsuit against the federal government regarding the new bathroom directive including Alabama, Texas, West Virginia, Maine, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Georgia, Utah, Wisconsin. The state department of Arizona and three individual school districts have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education and Department of Justice -- the two departments which sent the directive.
The lawsuit says that the federal directive was not rooted in law, and will cause "seismic changes in the operations of the nation's school districts."
Supporters of the lawsuit say that it was filed to secure protection for women and children from potential sexual abuse, but the federal departments had maintained that such incidents are not likely to happen.
