Posted on Friday, February 21, 2025
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by Sarah Katherine Sisk
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24 Comments
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A brewing scandal in Arlington County, Virginia, could become a political nightmare for Virginia Democrats this November after a school district’s transgender bathroom policies allowed a repeat sex offender to once again victimize children.
Late last year, Richard Kenneth Cox, a 58-year-old Tier III sex offender — the highest risk level — was charged with repeatedly exposing himself to women and girls in the locker room of Washington-Liberty High School (WLHS), which has an indoor pool open to the public. Cox reportedly gained access to the facility by telling staff that he identified as transgender.
The incident exposes two critical vulnerabilities in the current policies of Arlington Public Schools (APS). First, the district’s gender identity policy allows facility access based solely on self-declared gender identity. Second, the school’s public pool access policy permits general public entry outside of school hours. According to local ABC affiliate WJLA, these protocols led Cox to have unfettered access to invade the girls’ locker room by simply claiming to identify as a woman.
In a motion to dismiss the charges against him, Cox appeared to indirectly reference the district’s policies. “Nudity alone is not indecent,” he wrote. “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.”
But this latest incident isn’t Cox’s first run-in with the law over indecent exposure. In 1992, an Arlington County Grand Jury charged Cox with knowingly and intentionally exposing his genitals to a child under 14 years old. Last June, he was also charged with indecent exposure for allegedly exposing his genitals in the women’s locker room of a Planet Fitness – but charges were dismissed without explanation by Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, a far-left district attorney who has previously received criticism for failing to prosecute sex offenders.
WJLA reporter Nick Minock, who has extensively covered the case, reported that while Cox was in prison in the 90s, he admitted in a letter to a judge, “I am aware that I suffer compulsions to expose myself in public places.”
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, has now demanded the transfer of the case to his office, arguing that Descano’s decision unleashed subsequent incidents of sexual misconduct in Arlington County and put vulnerable groups at risk — including the women and girls to whom Cox exposed himself.
Miyares’s intervention highlights the broader legal and political tensions surrounding progressive prosecution policies when it comes to cases like this one. In a letter to Descano, Miyares accused him of turning Fairfax County into a “safe haven for criminals,” pointing to Cox’s extensive history of sexual offenses. Miyares cited reports of Cox’s previous convictions for taking “indecent liberties” with children during the 1990s, including “publicly masturbating in front of children inside an Arlington gymnasium.”
The controversy, just the latest school-related flashpoint in Northern Virginia, has galvanized conservative activists and parental rights groups to take action.
America First Legal has filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education, arguing that APS’s policies “provide greater rights to students whose ‘gender identity’ does not match their biological sex than it does to other students.” The complaint represents a broader legal challenge to what conservatives see as radical gender policies undermining student safety.
The U.S. Department of Education, for its part, has also taken action by opening an inquiry into APS’s transgender student policies, signaling potential federal intervention.
The incident validates long-standing concerns raised by parents. As Arlington resident Annie Quinn told the school board, she and others warned in 2019 that the district policy now in question lacked safeguards “to prevent a biological boy or man posing as a transgender girl or woman from using that [locker room] to invade the private changing spaces of girls and women on APS grounds for nefarious reasons, and now that has indeed happened.”
The political ramifications of the Arlington incident may ultimately extend far beyond a single school district – including to the Old Dominion’s upcoming gubernatorial race.
Former Representative Abigail Spanberger, considered to be the heavy favorite to be Virginia Democrats’ nominee for governor this November, has maintained strict silence on the scandal, despite calls from Virginia Republicans to denounce the transgender policy that led to the incident.
Spanberger’s flat refusal to acknowledge the problem bears a striking resemblance to Terry McAuliffe’s major campaign mistake of dismissing parental rights in education in 2021, when the issue helped carry Republican Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion. While Spanberger has stated that decisions about transgender athletes should be left to school officials, that attempt to sidestep the controversial issue of transgender bathroom and locker room policies likely rings hollow to many Virginia voters.
Recent polling shows that the race for governor this year is remarkably tight, with just a few points separating Spanberger and current Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, the likely Republican nominee. Sears has remained a staunch defender of women’s sports and of preventing biological males from entering female-only spaces throughout her tenure, a contrast she could use to thwart Spanberger’s efforts to bill herself as a moderate Democrat this November.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a senior at Hillsdale College pursuing a degree in Economics and Journalism. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
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