Arlington's Jim Crow Moment

The travesty of equating so-called "trans inclusion" with civil rights

On Wednesday, 20 August 2025, parents packed a school board meeting in Arlington, Virginia. They weren't there for budget discussions. They were furious and frightened because Richard Kenneth Cox, a 58-year-old registered sex offender, had exposed himself to girls at Washington-Liberty High School pool's changing room in October 2024. He faces 22 charges in Arlington County, including indecent exposure and sex offender on school property.

Richard Cox, 58, registered sex offender

Cox had visited multiple facilities across Arlington and Fairfax counties, gaining access simply by telling staff he "identified as transgender." Arlington Public Schools' policy specifically allows people to choose which changing rooms they use "based on their gender identity, not biological sex," which is exactly what enabled Cox's access. Even after the incidents, APS continues to defend the policy, stating that it "permits pool patrons to access restrooms and facilities that correspond to their gender identity."

Parents showed up because their daughters were at risk from a man with a pattern of exposing himself to women and girls, and the schools were still defending the policy that let him in.

Outside the meeting, activists waved rainbow flags and ready-made slogans. One placard caught the cameras:

"Hey Winsome, you have a gender neutral bathroom in your house."

On the back: "If trans can't share your bathroom, then blacks can't share my water fountain."

The sign targeted Virginia's Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, who'd been defending women's single-sex spaces. When asked about bathroom safety, Earle-Sears had put it bluntly: "Are you going to have a biological male undressing in the same gym room as you, full frontal? That's what we're asking our high school boys and girls to be together nude in the same locker room. This is nonsense."

Photographers snapped the Jim Crow sign, X exploded, and soon another attendee was warning the woman holding it that her face had gone viral "for all the wrong reasons." He wasn't wrong. Even Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger called it "racist, abhorrent and unacceptable."

The Language Theft

The water fountain slogan has become the go-to weapon for shutting down women who want safe spaces. It takes the reality of slavery and Jim Crow — families torn apart, people beaten and lynched, decades of systematic dehumanisation — and turns it into a toilet joke.

And they aimed it at Winsome Earle-Sears herself: a black woman, a Jamaican immigrant, a Marine veteran, now lieutenant governor of Virginia. Standing in what used to be the Confederate capital.

Her response was perfect: "I'm the sitting Lieutenant Governor, second in command in the former Capitol of the Confederate States. I'm an immigrant, a Marine, and above all, a human being. There is no place for this disgusting hatred in our Commonwealth."

But the reality on the ground was stark. One concerned parent at the meeting said: "I don't want to be in the bathroom with a person who may be a real transgender, but maybe he's not. Kids are confused, and I feel we do have to—as an adult, as a parent—I will be in charge to protect my child."

The woman holding the Jim Crow sign later defended it as "satire meant to provoke conversation around the absurdity of prejudice." She claimed anyone who thought she was "actually supporting separate drinking fountains based on race" was "mistaken." But her "satire" used black people's suffering as a punchline to shut down mothers worried about a sex offender targeting their daughters.

This is the twisted irony. Gender-critical women constantly get accused of racism, with activists claiming that defending sex-based rights somehow excludes black women. But we're not the ones making slavery comparisons. Trans activists are. They're the ones hijacking civil rights language. They're the ones using black people’s suffering as a weapon against women who want boundaries.

The truth is straightforward: black women are women; men who identify as trans are not. Richard Cox — a 58-year-old man with a history of exposing himself to women and girls — is not equivalent to black Americans who faced lynching, segregation, and systematic dehumanisation. Saying they're comparable isn't solidarity — it's an insult to every woman, black or otherwise.

When Civil Rights Meant Something

Lincoln's 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, ended slavery after a war that cost over 600,000 lives. It passed despite fierce Democratic opposition — the same party whose activists now wave Jim Crow slogans at women defending their daughters. Democrats voted against the 13th Amendment by overwhelming margins. They created the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation for nearly a century. They founded the Ku Klux Klan. They filibustered civil rights legislation through the 1960s.

Now their activists have the audacity to appropriate the language of civil rights — the language of a movement they historically opposed — to silence women who want safe spaces for their daughters. The party that created "Whites Only" water fountains now mocks women with signs about water fountains. The historical illiteracy is staggering, but the cynicism is worse.

A century after the 13th Amendment, the civil rights movement fought for dignity and equal citizenship in the real world. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ended school segregation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured voting rights.

These weren't abstract concepts. They were about real barriers: the right to walk into any school, sit at any lunch counter, drink from any water fountain. Real exclusion based on skin colour. Real change that cost real lives.

In June 1972, Congress passed Title IX to guarantee equal opportunities for women and girls in education. It was about sex — the biological reality that had kept girls out of classrooms and off sports teams.

Now activists take this history and flatten it into slogans designed to destroy women's rights. They've stolen the language of liberation and twisted it into a demand that girls give up their safety.

The Policy Wreckage

It's not just rhetoric. In June 2022, the Biden administration announced its intention to reinterpret Title IX to encompass gender identity. By April 2024, new rules were ready that would have erased "female" as a legal category in education.

A federal judge in Kentucky struck it down in January 2025, calling it unconstitutional. However, activists and schools often act as if it's still the law anyway. Arlington proves that.

When President Trump took office, he signed an executive order in February 2025 pulling federal funds from schools that let males into female sports or changing rooms. Five Northern Virginia districts — including Arlington — refused to comply and by July 2025, were at high risk of losing access to federal money.

It is ironic that Title IX, which was passed to secure women's rights, was being bent to destroy them. It was even more ironic that parents showed up to object to the misuse of the law got Jim Crow slogans thrown in their faces.

The institutional failure is complete. The Office for Civil Rights has now opened an investigation into Arlington Public Schools following the "incident of a nude adult male in a girls' locker room." Some officials are calling for "an emergency policy establishing distinct and separate restroom and changing facilities for females and males." But APS continues to resist, defending the very policy that enabled Cox's access.

Arlington isn't alone. Multiple Virginia districts are facing identical federal funding cuts over the same policies. The pattern is clear: schools adopt gender identity policies in the name of inclusion, predators exploit them, girls get hurt, and when parents object, they're called bigots.

The Real Theft

When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on 14 April 1865, he shouted sic semper tyrannis — "thus always to tyrants." He'd convinced himself he was striking down tyranny when he was actually murdering the man who'd freed the slaves: liberty twisted into murder.

The activists in Arlington did the same thing. They shouted "civil rights" while trying to erase women's rights. They wrapped their demands in the language of justice while defending policies that put girls at risk.

Both turned liberation into its opposite.

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Lincoln's top hat still exists — the one he left beside him that night. He used to stuff bits of paper inside it: speech drafts, reminders, fragments of the ideas that would end slavery.

Compare that to the cardboard sign waved in Arlington: a crude slogan turning girls' safety into a Jim Crow parody. One carried history towards freedom. The other carried lies designed to take freedom away.

Just Say It

Women who want sex-based boundaries aren't segregationists. Parents worried about their daughters aren't bigots. Using black suffering as a rhetorical weapon is racist. Using civil rights law to erase sex isn't progress — it's theft.

I admire Winsome Earle-Sears for standing in that room, facing down the sneers, and defending what matters: keeping girls safe. I admire every woman brave enough to defy the intimidation and tell the truth.

Toni Morrison wrote: "The function of freedom is to free someone else." Arlington showed that the principle was turned upside down. Activists shouted about inclusion, but their freedom was designed to strip women and girls of theirs.

Booth shouted about tyranny as he committed murder. Arlington activists shouted about civil rights as they tried to destroy them.

That's not inclusion. That's not justice. That's not civil rights.

That's stealing them.

Sara Morrison is the director of Genspect Ireland

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