National Review
Virginia School District Stands by ‘Inclusive’ Policies After Allowing Male Sex Offender in Girls’ Locker Room
By Haley Strack
February 7, 2025 2:54 PM
When Jen McDougal escorted her nine-year-old daughter to the locker room after swim practice in the early evening on September 9, 2024, she expected to see the usual changing-room scene: moms drying their giggling, teeth-chattering daughters. Instead, the room, full of about a dozen girls, was silent. Everyone was focused on the naked man who stood in the middle of their space.
McDougal’s daughter took lessons at the Washington-Liberty Aquatics Center, which is located inside Washington-Liberty High School, and is one of the three aquatics centers operated by Arlington Public Schools. Although the center’s locker rooms are restricted to student use during the school day, APS opens the locker rooms to the public outside of class hours, for recreational use and swim lessons for children as young as six months old.
At first, McDougal told National Review, she thought that the man was in the wrong place. His face and shoulders were covered with a towel, although his exposed penis was not, and he stood with his hands at his sides. Maybe he was older, she thought, and entered the room by mistake. But all of the other mothers seemed to flag him as a potential threat as well — they talked to their daughters in hushed voices and seemed as though they wanted to exit the room as quickly as possible.
‘I Can’t Stop Seeing It’
When they got to their car, McDougal’s daughter kept saying, “I can’t stop seeing it.”
McDougal told her was that if she was ever uncomfortable, or walked into a situation like that again, she should leave immediately. “You never have to feel stuck in a room like that,” she told her daughter.
Sitting in the parking lot, McDougal stuck around for a few minutes to see who would exit the facility. She saw a man come out eventually and “just knew it was him,” she said. “He had the smirk on his face that was just uncomfortable.”
That man, Richard Kenneth Cox, is a tier-three registered sex offender who was allowed in the locker room under Arlington Public Schools policy because he identifies as a woman.
Cox has a long rap sheet: in 1992, he exposed his genitals and masturbated in front of a child at a gymnasium; in 1992, he was convicted of burglary; in 2007, he was convicted of possessing obscene materials with a minor; in 2021, he was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender; in 2024, he was charged with indecent exposure for exposing himself in a women’s locker room at Planet Fitness. Cox has been a registered sex offender since 1998, and identifies as a woman, according to court documents. He was also on Virginia Department of Corrections’ most-wanted list in 2020.
In September 2024, people noticed Cox hanging out in the girls’ locker room at Washington-Liberty Aquatics Center. His “penis, testicles and legs were fully exposed to anyone walking through the entrance,” according to a civil rights complaint filed against Arlington Public Schools on Wednesday by the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI). Members of the community told aquatics center staff that “the Suspect had been exposing himself to young children throughout the girls’ locker room for over an hour in a time frame when ‘the locker rooms were packed with kids.'” Pool staff told McDougal that they had been getting complaints about Cox since at least summertime but couldn’t do anything about his presence because he identifies as transgender.
In October 2024, Cox was arrested after a parent reported to the police that he exposed his genitals to yet another female in the Washington-Liberty girls’ locker room. He was released from custody soon after when the victims declined to press charges.
In November, after Cox was reported for entering a women’s locker room at a local rec center, where he was identified as a sex offender, police investigated several other incidents that had occurred weeks earlier at Washington-Liberty, and charged him with indecent exposure. He will face those charges at a preliminary hearing in March.
As part of their ongoing investigation into Cox, Arlington police discovered multiple instances in which Cox allegedly exposed himself to women and children, including in the locker rooms of Wakefield High School in October and November and in the women’s locker room at Barcroft Sports & Fitness Center. He is scheduled to attend a preliminary hearing on those charges in March as well.
In total, Cox is facing charges of: indecent exposure, loitering at school after a sex conviction, indecent liberties with a child, entering a school after a sex conviction, and being near a playground.
After Cox was reported, then finally caught, APS did not revise its bathroom policy, which allows men to enter female spaces. It has, however, added “additional signage” to aquatic centers “that reminds all pool patrons to be considerate of others, privacy, cover intimate body areas when using shared spaces,” and has reviewed and adjusted “security protocols for signing in,” Superintendent Francisco Durán said in an email to families. Durán concluded his email with a note about inclusivity: “Arlington Public Schools will continue to foster an inclusive community for all, including members who identify as members of LGBTQ+ community.” At a recent school board meeting, Durán insisted that “we did not knowingly admit a sex offender into any of our aquatic facilities.”
When McDougal met with Arlington School Board Chair Mary Kadera at open office hours, Kadera took “prompt action” to implement the additional signage telling community members to cover up their body in locker rooms.
Other than that, district staff ignored McDougal’s emails. Pool staff didn’t take down her contact information or statement. McDougal — who wanted her daughter to complete swim lessons — found herself looking around the pool constantly, monitoring the locker room, and taking her daughter into private changing rooms when necessary, all to evade the intruder.
Cox wrote in a motion to dismiss the charge related to his Planet Fitness escapade that “nudity alone is not indecent, or we could not have public locker rooms at all. And the question of whether it is indecent for a transgender person to be nude in the locker room that they identify with has also been answered by our courts, our legislatures, and public opinion, and the answer is, No. So whatever it is that my accuser calls ‘indecent,’ other than the anti-trans discrimination that she harbors in her own mind, it has not been and cannot be proven to the court,” according to local news. However, Cox said in a 1995 letter to a judge that he was “aware that I suffer compulsions to expose myself in public places,” according to documents reviewed by 7News Reporter Nick Minock.
The superintendent, school board officials, and district staff who trained pool employees to disregard complaints of men in women’s spaces should all be held accountable for their actions, said Virginia Gentles, an Arlington mother and the director of Education Freedom and the Parental Rights Initiative at DFI, whose children used to take swim lessons at the Washington-Liberty Aquatics Center. According to APS district guidance, “All Arlington Public Schools staff shall be periodically trained on topics relating to transgender students. School staff members are responsible for taking prompt and effective steps to prevent and respond to harassment of any kind, including that which is based on gender identity.”
“Arlington Public Schools must follow Title IX requirements to keep spaces segregated by sex,” Gentles said. “I want to know that little girls in Arlington will no longer have to be subjected to naked men in the community locker rooms. That’s what I want as a parent, as an aunt, as a community member. From a DFI perspective, I want the U.S. Department of Education to make it clear that the Office of Civil Rights is going to enforce Title IX and the requirements that women and girls’ sports and spaces will be protected.”
Northern Virginia Fights to Preserve DEI
Such policies aren’t unique to Arlington. Elsewhere in northern Virginia, school districts have prioritized so-called “inclusive” policies at the expense of girls.
When in 2021, a “skirt-wearing” male student sexually assaulted a girl in a Loudoun County Public Schools high school bathroom, school officials covered up the event by transferring the boy to a different school — where he assaulted another girl.
Although courts blamed the incident on institutional failures that ignored and covered up the boy’s transgressions, parents, lawyers, and advocates blamed the school’s “inclusive” bathroom policy, which allows students to “use [restrooms and locker rooms] that correspond to their consistently asserted gender identity.”
Outrage over the event helped Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin win his race in November 2021. But years later, at least five northern Virginia public school systems — Alexandria City, Arlington County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, and Prince William County — still have in place policies that allow male students who “identify” as female to participate in girls’ sports, and gain access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, according to an America First Legal complaint filed this week.
Under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on Wednesday, school districts that allow gender-confused athletes to compete on a sports team or enter intimate spaces reserved for members of the opposite sex will be in violation of Title IX, and risk losing federal funding.
Virginia school districts may try to thwart his guidance. At a board meeting the week, the Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence claimed that the president would need Congress to take away funding for public schools that don’t comply with his EO. Spence said that “despite what some have come to believe, our DEI efforts are not about divisiveness, our DEIA efforts are instead about opportunity and about inclusion.”
McDougal, who fears that the locker-room intruder may get off easy due to Virginia’s liberal sentencing rules, disagrees.
“It’s an abuse of women’s right to feel safe in public spaces,” she said. “I understand there are a lot of people who say you can’t take away a person’s right to use a bathroom that they feel is appropriate for them. But this loophole is what created this situation for us. And he was allowed to enter that restroom, that facility, because he identified as transgender.”
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