Virginia students protest governor’s transgender policies

McLEAN, Va. — Student activists held school walkouts across Virginia on Tuesday to protest Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed changes to the state’s guidance on transgender student policies, revisions that would roll back some accommodations.

Beginning Tuesday morning, students streamed out of their classrooms to decry the model policies unveiled earlier this month. If adopted by school districts, the policies would require parental sign-off on the use of any name or pronoun other than what’s in a student’s official record. They also say participation in certain school programming and use of school facilities should be based on a student’s biological sex, with modifications offered only to the extent required under federal law.

“We decided to hold these walkouts as kind of a way to ... disrupt schools and essentially have students be aware of what’s going on,” Natasha Sanghvi, a northern Virginia high school senior and member of the Pride Liberation Project who helped organize the resistance effort, told The Associated Press.

Sanghvi said the existing, more permissive state policies, which were adopted under former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration, had been powerful in helping students feel affirmed in their identities at school. The new ones, she said, have the potential to harm “every single queer student in the state of Virginia.”

Defenders of the Youngkin model policies, some of whom weighed in through an online public comment period that opened Monday, said the changes lent greater respect to the role of parents in their children’s lives.