Virginia’s proposed Board of Health rule barring transgender women and girls from female-only sports teams, locker rooms and changing areas is dead. Governor Abigail Spanberger’s administration withdrew the rulemaking on July 30, 2026, without any public announcement, after concluding the board had no legal authority to issue it.
The withdrawal ends a process that began with a citizen petition in April 2025 and ran through two public comment periods without a single line of regulatory text ever being written. It is a quiet, procedural close to a fight that belongs to a much longer record of transgender history and public policy in the United States — and it is worth being precise about what did and did not happen.
What exactly did Virginia withdraw?
Virginia withdrew a notice of intent to write a rule, not a rule.
The action, numbered 6905 on the Virginia Regulatory Town Hall, was titled “Promulgate Regulations Governing Biological Sex Specific or Separated Spaces and Activities.” It would have created a new chapter, 12 VAC 5-660, in the Commonwealth’s health regulations. The agency’s own summary described its purpose as adding rules “to prevent biological males from participating in organized female-only athletic teams and competitions in Virginia, and to prevent biological males from using designated female spaces where females are likely to be in any state of undress.”
A Notice of Intended Regulatory Action, or NOIRA, is the first formal stage in Virginia’s rulemaking process. It announces that an agency intends to write a regulation and opens a comment period on that intention. Action 6905 never advanced past it. On the docket, the line for “Preliminary Draft Text” reads: None submitted. Nothing was struck from the books on July 30, because nothing had been put there.
Who asked for the rule in the first place?
Three Virginia women who compete in women’s athletics filed the petition that started it.
Petition for Rulemaking 432 was filed on April 10, 2025 by Réka György, Lily Mullens and Carter Satterfield, described in the filing as “female athletes in Virginia who have been directly harmed by males competing in female collegiate sports.” The petition argued that the Virginia Board of Health held the necessary authority under sections 32.1-2 and 32.1-12 of the Code of Virginia — the provisions establishing the board’s public health mandate, which includes preventive services “focused on women’s health.” It asserted that the public health of women and girls “demands that the Department of Health take action.”
That petition drew 2,334 public comments during a three-week window in May 2025. On August 18, 2025, the board voted 14–0 to grant it and begin a regulatory change. The vote was unanimous, and it was a vote to start writing — not a vote on anything written.
How far did the rulemaking actually get?
It cleared executive review under Governor Glenn Youngkin, was published in the Virginia Register, collected a second round of comments, and then stopped.
| Date | Step in the record |
|---|---|
| April 10, 2025 | Petition for Rulemaking 432 filed by three Virginia female athletes |
| May 5–26, 2025 | Petition comment period — 2,334 comments received |
| August 18, 2025 | State Board of Health votes 14–0 to initiate a regulatory change |
| October 28, 2025 | Governor’s review completed under Glenn Youngkin; result: approved |
| November 17, 2025 | Notice published in the Virginia Register, Volume 42, Issue 7 |
| December 17, 2025 | Second comment period closes — 321 comments received |
| July 30, 2026 | Rulemaking stage withdrawn; no draft text ever submitted |
| September 12, 2026 | Spanberger tells a Virginia Pridefest crowd the effort is over |
The second comment period, on the notice itself, closed on December 17, 2025 with 321 comments. Seven months later the stage was withdrawn. The docket records the status in a single line: “Stage withdrawn on 07/30/2026 after the comment period had ended.”
Why did Spanberger’s administration stop it?
Because it concluded the Board of Health did not have the power to write such a rule.
“There’s no legal authority to move forward with rulemaking and prior administrations may have tried to create lanes and we’re not doing that,” Spanberger told a reporter after speaking at Virginia Pridefest on September 12, 2026. People familiar with the decision told Radio IQ, which first reported the withdrawal, that her office consulted Attorney General Jay Jones’s office before determining the rule fell outside the board’s reach.
That distinction matters, and it is easy to lose. The stated reason for stopping was jurisdictional: a question about who may act, not a finding about whether the underlying policy was sound.
Why did none of this surface until September?
Because no one announced it.
No news release accompanied the withdrawal. The change was entered on the Virginia Regulatory Town Hall docket for Action 6905, which is a public record and has been available to anyone who thought to look, and then sat there for six weeks. Radio IQ reported it on September 14, 2026, two days after Spanberger addressed the Pridefest crowd in Richmond. People close to the governor told the station she did not want to “bring additional fights that some may be really willing to create.”
How are the two sides responding?
Advocacy organizations welcomed the withdrawal; the officials and athletes who sought the rule have said little publicly.
Narissa Rahaman, executive director of Equality Virginia, said she was glad to see the rule withdrawn. “Transgender Virginians deserve to move about their daily lives and access facilities like every Virginian without fear or discrimination,” she said. Shannon McKay, of the trans youth support group He She Ze and We, added that it is “important for our community, families with transgender and nonbinary youth and adults, to see and know our elected officials are publicly and proudly standing up for them.”
On the other side, Youngkin did not return requests for comment made through his Spirit of Virginia PAC before Radio IQ published. The three petitioners had not issued public statements as of this writing. Their case has not gone unstated, though — it is set out at length in the petition itself, which remains on the public docket. Readers who want the argument in its proponents’ own words can find it there rather than in anyone’s summary of it, including mine.
The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed these disputes across state lines. Virginia is arguing about which body gets to decide; California spent this summer arguing about whether a state or the federal government gets to decide, as I wrote in states’ rights, until a state disagrees. The venue changes. The question underneath does not.
What does the withdrawal change, and what does it not?
It closes one regulatory route in one state. It settles nothing about the underlying question.
No existing Virginia law or regulation changed on July 30. No school, college or athletic body was required to do anything differently, because the proposal had never reached the point of requiring anything. What ended was a particular attempt to answer a contested question through the state’s public health regulations rather than through its legislature or its courts.
And the route is closed rather than sealed. A new petition can be filed with the board. A future governor can start a fresh rulemaking. The General Assembly can legislate directly, which is the path the authority finding implicitly points toward. Meanwhile the federal picture moves on its own schedule; the Supreme Court’s decision on state bans in school sports is now a season old, and I looked at what it changed on the ground in the transgender sports ruling, one season later.
A note on reading this kind of news
Stories like this one arrive with a headline verb — killed, scrapped, ended — that suggests something large fell over. What happened in Virginia is smaller and, I think, more interesting: a proposal that had cleared a unanimous board vote and a governor’s review turned out to rest on a question nobody had settled, which was whether the board could do this at all.
Two years of process ended in a sentence fragment: Stage withdrawn. For the transgender Virginians who would have lived under the rule, and for the athletes who asked for it, that fragment is not a small thing. But it is also not the last word, and treating it as one would be a mistake in either direction. More context on how these fights are structured, and the terms they turn on, is collected in the reference library.
Frequently asked questions
Did Virginia repeal a transgender sports rule?
No. Nothing was repealed, because no rule was ever written. Virginia withdrew a Notice of Intended Regulatory Action — the first formal step in creating a regulation. The docket entry for preliminary draft text reads “None submitted,” meaning the proposal ended before any regulatory language existed.
What was Petition 432?
Petition for Rulemaking 432 was filed on April 10, 2025 by Réka György, Lily Mullens and Carter Satterfield. It asked the Virginia Board of Health to amend its regulations to bar people the petition described as “biological males” from female-only athletic teams and from female-designated spaces where women may be undressed.
When was the Virginia transgender sports rule withdrawn?
The rulemaking stage was withdrawn on July 30, 2026, after its public comment period had closed. The withdrawal was recorded on the Virginia Regulatory Town Hall docket but was not announced, and it was not reported publicly until September 14, 2026.
Did the Virginia Board of Health support the rule?
The board voted 14–0 on August 18, 2025 to grant the petition and initiate a regulatory change. That vote started the process; it did not approve any rule text. The board never voted on a draft regulation, because none was produced.
What did Governor Spanberger say about the withdrawal?
Speaking to reporters after Virginia Pridefest on September 12, 2026, Spanberger said: “There’s no legal authority to move forward with rulemaking and prior administrations may have tried to create lanes and we’re not doing that.” Her stated reason was authority, not the merits of the underlying question.
Can the rule come back?
The regulatory path is closed for now, not sealed. A new petition can be filed with the board, a future administration can begin a fresh rulemaking, and the General Assembly can legislate directly. Any renewed attempt through the Board of Health would face the same question about the board’s authority.
Does this change what Virginia schools have to do right now?
No. Because the proposed rule never took effect, withdrawing it leaves current practice exactly where it was. Any requirements that apply to Virginia schools and athletic programs today come from other sources — state law, local school board policy and athletic association rules — none of which this action touched.
Continue Exploring
More in Politics