The Education Department determined Denver’s public school system violated federal law when a city high school converted a girls’ restroom into an all-gender facility — and is now threatening to sanction one of Colorado’s biggest school districts.
The federal government is now demanding that Denver agree to convert all its gender-neutral school bathrooms into “sex-designated multi-stall restrooms” — and enact a series of related policies within 10 days or risk penalties, according to a proposed department agreement to resolve a civil rights investigation the agency launched early this year.
The department’s move expands a tactic the Trump administration used against five Virginia school districts earlier this month: threatening federal sanctions against schools that refuse to comply with similar demands.
“Denver Public Schools violated Title IX and its implementing regulations by converting a sex-segregated restroom designated for girls in East High School to an ‘all-gender’ facility and by allowing students to use the high school’s intimate facilities on the basis of their ‘gender identity’ rather than their biological sex,” said Craig Trainor, the department’s acting civil rights chief.
“Denver is free to endorse a self-defeating gender ideology,” Trainor said in a statement. “But it is not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students in violation of Title IX.”
A spokesperson for the Denver school system said the district had just received the government’s findings on Thursday afternoon and was determining its next steps.
Launched days after President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, the Denver investigation was the department’s first independently initiated civil rights inquiry of 2025.
The agency’s Office for Civil Rights said the construction of an all-gender restroom at East High School — one of Denver’s marquee public schools — could amount to discrimination against female students because the district converted a girls’ bathroom into the all-gender facility. That left an exclusively-male restroom intact, but not one solely for female students on the building’s second floor.
The department said the school ultimately converted the boys’ restroom on the second floor into an all-gender restroom, but added that decision did not resolve the district’s underlying violation of the administration’s interpretation of federal anti-sex discrimination law.
OCR initiated the probe after a local news report about the creation of the restroom that included a complaint from a parent.
The Education Department is now asking the district to “convert and redesignate” all its multi-stall restrooms into sex-designated spaces. It is also demanding that Denver schools rescind any policies or guidance that allow students to access intimate facilities based on “gender identity,” among other actions.