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Jen McDougal was escorting her nine-year-old daughter to an after-school swim class in Arlington, Virginia, last fall when she was met with a shocking and unwelcome sight: a fully naked man in the girls’ locker room, surrounded by visibly nervous and silent girls who were trying to change.

The man was Richard Cox, a 58-year-old trans-identifying male whom McDougal would later learn is a registered child sex offender in Virginia. Cox has since been charged with 22 counts of indecent exposure, loitering within 100 feet of school property, and taking indecent liberties with children, among other charges — but only after he had been allowed to enter and undress in at least four different women’s facilities across Arlington and Fairfax Counties, including two public school locker rooms, over the span of several months.

McDougal and her young daughter came face to face with Cox in Washington Liberty High School’s locker room last September. The incident has forced McDougal to have difficult conversations with her children about their safety, and with local officials over the policies that allowed a sex offender to repeatedly expose himself to children in the first place.

“There was a feeling that this was just not right,” McDougal told IWFeatures. “I wanted my daughter to know what happened wasn’t OK, and that her gut feeling that that wasn’t OK was correct.”

And yet, when McDougal first walked into the locker room and saw Cox fully undressed, she admitted she wondered if she had misread the situation. For a brief moment, McDougal said, she was tempted to think Cox wandered into the wrong locker room and then “felt stuck.” The alternative — that Cox had deliberately entered the girls’ locker room knowing there would be dozens of under-aged girls changing before swim class — was too appalling to wrap her head around.

But after informing Washington Liberty High School’s pool management of the incident, McDougal realized that’s exactly what had happened. In fact, school officials informed McDougal that they knew exactly who she was referring to in her complaint, and that they had granted Cox access to the girls’ locker room because of Arlington Public Schools’ policy allowing individuals, including community members, to use the school restroom and locker room corresponding with their gender identity. 

Cox, they said, had identified himself as a woman, and therefore had to be granted access to all women’s facilities. If McDougal and her daughter didn’t feel comfortable sharing an intimate space with Cox, they could use the private family dressing rooms instead, the concerned mother recalls being told.

McDougal agreed the private family dressing room was the safest option for her daughter. Noticeably, many of the other moms did as well, McDougal said, because the line to the private dressing rooms suddenly became long ahead of swim class each day.

Still, even after leaving the public locker room, McDougal said she felt she had to be on guard throughout her daughter’s swim classes. 

“I was always looking for [Cox],” McDougal said. 

However, despite the fact that Cox had been changing in the locker room ostensibly to use the facility’s pool during the public swimming hours along with everyone else, McDougal said she never saw him in the pool. In fact, she said she never saw him so much as enter the swimming area. 

Other moms who privately complained about the situation, according to text messages obtained by the Arlington GOP, seemed to confirm that Cox only ever loitered in the locker room — sometimes clothed while watching the women and girls inside, or fully undressed, “taking his time being naked.”

And yet McDougal has been shocked at how few women affected by Cox’s actions have been willing to speak up, even after Cox’s criminal history was publicly revealed and he was arrested and charged by local law enforcement.

“I’m finding it really difficult to understand that, based on [Cox’s] sex offender history and the number of times [Cox] went in, and the number of people exposed to [Cox], that women aren’t saying: there was a sex offender in a room with my daughter?” McDougal said.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a “mental block” when it comes to the issue of trans-identifying males in women’s spaces, McDougal said, especially in liberal parts of the country such as northern Virginia. 

“No one wants to be the person judging someone,” McDougal, who described herself as politically independent, said. “I think there’s just a lot of fear around it. There’s a fear of speaking out against this, against both the individual and the policy that allowed [Cox] into the locker room. Fear of retribution in the school system, in friend groups, and among moms. I know I was afraid — I didn’t want to be judged.”

But the facts in this case speak for themselves. After they were called to the Barcroft Sports & Fitness Center in December 2024 on a report that a registered sex offender was exposing himself in the women’s facilities, Arlington County law enforcement confirmed the individual was Cox and that he was, in fact, a registered child sex offender with a lengthy criminal history that dates back to the 1990s. 

A few of the original crimes for which Cox was indicted sound eerily familiar: in 1992, for example, Cox visited a school gymnasium and began masturbating in front of multiple children. While incarcerated, Cox wrote to a judge in 1995 that he still “suffer[ed] compulsions to expose myself in public places.”

Cox has served five prison sentences for his various crimes. In 2020, the Virginia Department of Corrections even listed him on its “Most Wanted” list for violating his probation and failing to register as a child sex offender.

Cox appears to only recently have begun claiming a female “gender identity,” and one interaction with local law enforcement in November 2024 helps explain why. In police body camera footage obtained by 7News, Cox insisted his “civil rights” as a trans-identifying male require that he be allowed around women and children despite his sex offender status.

“I understand that they’re concerned about my history and that’s the reason they’re banning me,” Cox said after being banned from local recreation centers by the Fairfax County Parks Authority. 

“My understanding of the sex offender registry is it is a tool to be used to prevent any sort of future criminal offenses,” Cox told the cops. “Now, my civil rights as a transgender person allows me to use a public facility including the restrooms or changing rooms that identify with my gender, and you can see on my ID that I’m recognized by the Commonwealth of Virginia as female. So exercising my civil rights is not a criminal offense.”

But what about the rights of Fairfax County’s women and girls, many of whom were violated by Cox because of a policy that, in practice, supports his worldview? The county’s refusal to protect sex-exclusive spaces undoubtedly elevated his “rights” as a trans-identified male over the sex-based rights of women and girls who were forced to sacrifice their privacy and safety to accommodate him. 

Fairfax County officials did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

“Where in the hierarchy of rights does a victim’s rights fall?” McDougal asked. “It’s not an equal playing field here.”

That’s why it’s so important for more women to come forward and demand that the county and school district close the “loophole” that Cox was able to exploit, McDougal argued.

“No matter your thoughts on this, we have to separate the issue: do you want a sex offender in a restroom with your kid? I can’t imagine any woman or mother I know telling their kid to go in there when [Cox] is in there,” she said.

“For me, this isn’t a political issue,” McDougal added. “This is a women’s issue. And women’s issues shouldn’t be considered partisan in any way.”