Months after a sex scandal rocked her family, Sarasota, Florida school board member Bridget Ziegler is once again in the spotlight—this time for targeting transgender students. Ziegler, who’s now serving her third term on the Sarasota County School Board, led a 4-to-1 vote last week opposing new Title IX protections issued by the Biden administration that expand federal safeguards for transgender students.
She took to Facebook to say the changes mark a “weakening of the Title IX protections for women,.. Any weakening of the Title IX protections for women is a direct attack on our women and girls. A true War on Women.” The lone vote against the measure came from Tom Edwards, the board’s only out gay member.
He fired back at the meeting, saying, “I view this resolution as no more than what Mrs. Ziegler said: ‘Game on.’ And that’s politics 100 percent of the time.” The vote comes just months after a very public scandal involving Ziegler and her husband, Christian Ziegler. A Sarasota woman accused Christian of rape, though investigators said the encounter was “likely consensual.”
The woman—and the Zieglers—acknowledged they had engaged in a threesome. Christian Ziegler was later removed as Florida’s GOP chair, and Bridget lost her post at the conservative Leadership Institute. Still, Ziegler hasn’t resigned from the board and has ramped up her anti-trans rhetoric online, sharing posts attacking gender-affirming care and dismissing Biden’s reforms. Her return to the school board has drawn sharp public backlash, with critics calling her a hypocrite for policing student identities while refusing to take accountability for her own actions.
