Two police officers in Virginia are facing suspension and possible dismissal after objecting to a gender-confused male recruit being permitted to use women’s locker facilities, according to a new report.
Independent Women’s Features interviewed Norfolk Police Department officers Meghan Grabow and Martin Powers, who described a controversy that began in 2024 involving a transgender recruit. The officers said the recruit, who was reportedly born male, appeared in social media posts wearing wigs and makeup, while department leadership instructed staff to treat the individual as female.
LifeSiteNews reports: Powers saw nobody in the group of new recruits who stood out as transgendered, so he initially concluded “maybe everybody was just grossly mistaken.” But that proved not to be the case when, while Grabow was changing during a shift, she said a recruit came in and made no effort to dress or act like a woman.
“I’m completely stripped down to my underwear, and … (in comes) a man. Here comes this man in a suit and tie … And (he) just stared at me,” she recalled. “What are you doing in here?” she asked, only for him to ignore her and move to another locker. After she dressed, Grabow reported the incident to both her captain and the training academy captain, who were dismissive.
“What were you doing in the locker room in your underwear?” she says her captain asked of her. “Am I going crazy?” she thought at the time. “This is not happening, right? This is so surreal.”
“That man looked at me like a dude would, not a woman,” she recalls explaining to them, only to get a flippant remark about bringing her gun to the shower if she felt unsafe. She accused the department of having “kept it a secret until … it happened to one of us. They knew exactly who I was talking about and why they were in my locker room.”
Later, a female detective organized a meeting of more than a dozen male and female officers with Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot, who refused to let the officers refer to the recruit with anything other than the “proper term” of “woman,” changing the incident to misleadingly imply that Grabow “looked up and saw a woman standing there.”
“All you’re doing is dictating our speech,” Powers spoke out. “Will you define the word ‘woman?’” He was told to leave. “My gun was taken at the end of my shift” the same day, he added. The following Monday, the captain told him, “From now on, you just go home and sit at home because you’re making the chief look bad.” He was suspended in January and has since been fired, barring him from getting a job in another department.
Meanwhile, “sole female recruit was forced to change multiple times per day in front of the transgender-identified male recruit,” the report noted, according to Powers. “She reportedly opened up two locker doors to claim a small amount of privacy each time she needed to change.”
“We (were) now just going to the nearest 7-Eleven to use the bathroom on shift,” Grabow said. “We don’t have anywhere to shower … We all just kind of gave up that anything was going to be done.” Grabow has also been suspended, and she is appealing. Powers is also reviewing his options for recourse.
The workplace environment at the NPD “has scared women to death,” Grabow said. “They are terrified to even make a complaint about anything because they know what’s going to happen. The fear of reprisal is so serious.”
“The immediate danger is perverted men being allowed into females’ intimate spaces,” Powers added. “The long-term societal danger … is that mindset right there, that ‘speech is only free if it’s in your head.’”