This week, two Michigan parents filed a lawsuit against their child’s school district, alleging that the district referred to their autistic daughter by a masculine name and male pronouns behind their backs.
The parents, Dan and Jennifer Mead, filed the lawsuit on Monday against the Rockford Public School District and its board of education.
According to the complaint, shared by Alliance Defending Freedom, the school district had never hidden information about their teenage daughter, “G.M.,” until this incident occurred (via ADF):
As directed by the District’s policy, District employees—employees the Meads had trusted with sensitive information about G.M.’s mental health— deliberately changed G.M.’s school records to conceal the fact that the District was treating their daughter as a boy without their knowledge. The Meads only discovered it because one employee forgot to remove the masculine name and male pronouns from one section of G.M.’s records, after removing it from other sections of the same document, and inadvertently gave the Meads the document she had only partially altered.
Yet, even after this revelation, the employee went back and further altered the District’s only copy of this document to remove reference to the masculine name and male pronouns the District was using for G.M.
These actions and the other actions detailed below violated the Meads’ long-settled constitutional rights. The First Amendment protects their right to exercise their religion by directing G.M.’s education and upbringing, including on fundamental questions of existence like how G.M. identifies herself. And the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees their fundamental right to make decisions about her upbringing, education, and healthcare.
Michigan parents sue school district for using male pronouns, different name for daughter: suit https://t.co/oKk1hVu53y pic.twitter.com/Uv9V2q0TIz
— New York Post (@nypost) December 21, 2023
“No one with the school district told them that the school district had begun to treat her as a boy by calling her a masculine name and by male pronouns,” Vincent Wagner, an attorney for the parents, told WOODTV. Shortly before, G.M. had been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder.
In Oct. 2022, Dan and Jennifer Mead pulled their daughter out of school and began homeschooling her. The lawsuit seeks nominal damages, compensatory damages, attorney’s fees, court costs, among other things.
This is not the first time Townhall has reported on a school district concealing a student's "transgender" identity from their parents. Earlier this year, Townhall reported how a “woke” teacher in New York allegedly “manipulated” a 5th grade girl into changing her gender without her parents’ knowledge or consent and caused her “suicidal ideation,” according to a lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleged that teacher Debra Rosenquist at the Terryville Road Elementary School in Terryville, New York, singled out then-9-year-old “A.V.” throughout the 2021-2022 school year. Allegedly, Rosenquist “forced” the young girl to go by male pronouns and a male name (“Leo”), the girl's parents allege. This went on for some time before A.V.’s parents were made aware.
In January 2022, A.V. drew a picture at school that showed a girl with the words “I wanna kill myself” and “I feel sad a lot,” according to the lawsuit. After the parents discovered what was going on, they had their daughter switch classrooms. From that point on, their daughter experience bullying and harassment from peers as a direct result of her teacher allegedly forcing her to go by a male name and pronouns.
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