Group files federal complaint over Illinois transgender student using locker room

CHICAGO — Deerfield Public Schools District 109 is in the national crosshairs, with a conservative group filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice accusing the district of forcing middle school students to change into gym clothes in front of a transgender student.

The incident previously gained national attention after the mother of one of the students, Nicole Georgas, went on Fox News to criticize the district over the alleged incident. She also spoke during a school board meeting to demand that locker rooms and bathrooms be designated for either biological males or biological females, arguing there is “already a gender-neutral option.”

In a previous statement, the district said students are not required to change into gym clothes in front of others in locker rooms and have “multiple options to change in a private location if they wish.”

The district said its policies and procedures, including those related to students’ use of locker rooms, are in line with state laws, the Illinois School Code and guidance from the Illinois State Board of Education.

“District 109 is committed to providing a learning environment where all students and staff are respected and supported,” the statement said.

Conservative nonprofit America First Legal announced Tuesday it had filed a complaint with the criminal section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, urging it to conduct a criminal investigation into District 109 and its administrators over the alleged incident.

A DOJ spokesman declined comment, but a department source with knowledge of the complaint confirmed it was submitted. Attempts to reach the Illinois State Board of Education for comment were unsuccessful.

AFL claims the district violated Title IX and President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168, called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” AFL was founded in 2021 by Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser.

According to AFL’s allegations, the district’s policy of allowing the transgender student to use the girls’ bathroom and locker room led to a protest by a group of teenage girls who refused to change for gym class.

AFL claims school administrators “admonished (the students), and threatened them with discipline for ‘misgendering’ the boy and refusing to change for PE.”

“Shockingly, the school administrators, including the superintendent of student services, and the assistant principal, entered the girls’ locker room and used their authority to intimidate the girls into changing in front of the boy,” the AFL said.

In the release, Ian Prior, an AFL senior counsel, claimed the students’ “First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights” had been “sacrificed at the altar of radical transgender madness and the woke government bureaucrats that view the Constitution as nothing more than toilet paper” and district officials “should face the long arm of our Justice Department.”

Protesters on both sides of the controversy were expected at Thursday evening’s school board meeting, with Moms For Liberty Lake County and several LGBTQ organizations expected to advocate for support.

Kristal Larson, who is the executive director of the LGBTQ+ Center Lake County, Avon Township’s clerk and a transgender woman, said during a transgender visibility event last month that there is “a lot of anger” and “concern” over what has been happening in Deerfield.

“There’s fear that other schools may be targeted in the same way, and that Lake County can become unsafe,” Larson said.

But the controversy over the unidentified transgender student’s bathroom and locker room use goes far beyond Lake County’s, and even the state’s, borders, Larson added, saying the transgender community has been a target of the new presidential administration.

Executive orders from the Trump administration seek to stop transgender, nonbinary and intersex people from changing their gender markers on passports or serving in the military, force transgender women in federal prisons to be housed with men and bar them from participation in female sports.

The orders also attempt to end gender-affirming care for transgender people younger than 19, and prohibit federal spending on the promotion of “gender ideology.”

“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” Trump wrote in an executive order.

The Deerfield controversy has attracted attention from unusual places. Last month, District 109 put out a statement saying it was aware members of the community had received communications asking them to complete a survey about Deerfield schools, which they clarified were not from the district. In the statement, the district said it was not aware of who was distributing the survey.

In late March, Dave Nayak, a Chicago-area politician and former Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for the District 20 seat and said he had turned on the “radical left,” announced he had commissioned a survey from conservative pollster group M3 about the district’s transgender policies, ultimately calling for the district to change its policies.

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(Jason Meisner of the Chicago Tribune contributed to this report.)

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