– Spokane, WA
Early this week, the Central Valley School District – which makes up the bulk of the city of Spokane Valley in terms of the number of students enrolled – determined to stand against the state of Washington’s policies regarding allowing boys to participate in girl’s WIAA-sponsored athletics.
At their meeting May 6, 2025, the district voted to file a formal complaint against the Washington state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, issuing a letter to the US Department of Education and the Department of Justice, calling upon the federal government to investigate the state’s allowance of so-called transgender students to cross the gender barrier and participate in sports at odds with their God-given sex.
Their letter, similar to one being drafted by Mead school district in north Spokane, calls upon the DOJ to investigate the state of Washington’s policies regarding its allowance of boys to play in girl’s sports under the guise of claiming to be “transgendered”, as Washington has formally included transgender and non-binary sexual identities under protected groups according to Title IX.
Part of the drafted letter, ultimately to be voted on by the school board in Spokane Valley, reads:
“In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”
The letters for both Mead and CV school districts also go on to challenge Washington state’s public policies, which fly directly in the face of President Trump’s executive order signed in February, banning men from women’s sports. And while publicly, Trump and his DOJ have sued the state of Maine for its own defiance of that order, Washington’s abject refusal to comply continues to go on unnoticed and unchallenged.
This accounts for more than just a casual disagreement between state and federal policies. It constitutes the state superintendent’s direct assault on both federal policy and on the young girls subjected to the state’s wayward position. And just as damaging, it holds the sword over the head of any district that dares to disagree.
The early days of the Trump Administration saw a flurry of activity unmatched by any previous presidency. The president in his first week signed 36 orders and over 100 days increased that number to 142.
One of those, mentioned above, was the order preserving gender separation in collegiate and high school athletics. This was signed in accordance with Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, which was set forward as a way to increase equal opportunity for athletics for young women and girls at high school and collegiate levels where federal funds are used.
The Biden Administration in 2024 attempted to hijack the wording of Title IX to retroactively include “gender identity”. Those attempts failed at a federal level, but many states followed suit with greater success. Washington is one of those states.
In 2022, the office of the State Superintendent put out a notice ensuring to include so-called “transgendered and non-binary” students in the scope of Title IX.
Thus when the EO to “Keep Men out of Women’s Sports” received the presidential signature, Washington state’s new School Superintendent Chris Reykdal was ready with a challenge:
“One thing is clear: The 47th President of the United States is disregarding the rule of law by attempting to unilaterally impose an attack on the specific student groups that anti-discrimination laws aim to protect,” Reykdal’s statement read on February 6.
“The President’s order directly contradicts state law, including the Washington Law Against Discrimination, and our laws prohibiting discrimination in our public schools. Our state law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and we will not back down from that.”
Drilling down to the local level, the uncertainty of the situation between the state and federal levels of government is keenly felt by individual school districts like Central Valley and Mead in Spokane.
In Greek myth, Damocles was punished by his king by having a sword suspended over his head by a single hair. It was meant to teach him the fear and anxiety one should feel at the hands of his sovereign.
This is the anxiety being felt by these school districts who nevertheless feel compelled to make a stand.
The sad reality for school sports is that nearly all of the funding for those programs comes via the state or federal government. At the federal level, Trump’s order has instructed the DOE to strip federal funding from school districts who allow for boys to participate in girl’s sports.
At the same moment, Washington’s OSPI has also threatened to pull state funding from any school seeking to bar boys from girls’ playing fields and locker rooms.
"Each side is saying they're going to withhold funding if we don’t comply," said Anniece Barker, a CVSD board member, expressing the board’s frustration over the lack of clear directives.
The decision from a moral perspective may seem easy, especially for a board that already feels compelled to speak out in defense of its daughters. But while a removal of federal funds would hurt these districts already operating on razor thin margins, those funds only make up 5% of the district budgets. The state funds, meanwhile, tied to the position detested by these board members, account for 78% of school operating budgets.
To lose that kind of funding would cripple or outright destroy any hope of maintaining a school district’s athletics program. This would in turn gut much of that district’s enrollment, with sports held at such a premium.
On Tuesday, knowing these risks, Central Valley put everything on the line to make a plea to the federal Department of Justice. They have joined the ranks of a growing number of districts doing the same, with the hopes that Attorney General Pam Bondi will take action against Reykdal’s office.
The thrust of this complaint and all the others like it, is that state actors have willfully thrust gender identity into a federal policy (Title IX) to justify their state-wide inclusion of boys into girls athletics. At the same time, those state actors have cried foul against the federal government for clarifying via Executive Order that Title IX does not extend to gender identity.
It is a clear time for the federal government to lift the iron curtain that removes Washington and the rest of the west coast from its view.
