Late last year, Townhall reported how a set of 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.
“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 reporters at the time.
Now, another set of parents has filed a lawsuit over a similar situation.
A couple in Adams County, Colorado, are suing the state, the state Department of Education and their daughter’s school district for encouraging their daughter to transition to the opposite gender behind their backs.
According to CBS News, the couple is saying that the state of Colorado, the Education Department and the 27J School District all violated their constitutional rights by encouraging their child to secretly transition (CBS News):
At issue is a new state law that requires schools to use the preferred name and pronoun of students who are transitioning to a different gender, and a policy at 27J Schools that prevents high schools from notifying parents without a student's consent, noting, in some cases, telling parents puts kids at risk.
The parents, who go by John and Jane Doe in the lawsuit, claim that their 14-year-old daughter was struggling with depression and anxiety when she turned to a counselor at Brighton High School for help. She reportedly told the counselor that she had “feelings of transgender identification.”
The parents claim that the counselor encouraged the child to begin using a “non-female name and pronouns at school” and receive mental health treatment through a state sponsored portal called i-Matter. There, a therapist allegedly discussed hormone therapy and irreversible sex reassignment surgery.
Now, after seeing a private therapist, the now 16-year-old girl reportedly regrets wanting to transition and identifies as female again.
"It happened all in secret for months and months without our clients knowing," Eric Sell, one of the attorneys representing the parents, said.
"What we're arguing is parents have the constitutional right to consent and be informed of treatment that the government is providing. This isn't something that the schools should be doing on an ad hoc basis at the child's direction,” Sell added.
Predictably, pro-transgender advocates who spoke to CBS News claimed that the child should be allowed to transition behind her parents’ backs.
"There have been federal courts, circuit and district courts across the country that recognizes that students have privacy rights, and those privacy rights include the right to keep certain information from their parents,” John McHugh, an attorney who specializes in LGBTQ cases, told the outlet.
"Not everybody is a great parent. Kids are put at risk at home on a regular basis. Why create more risk and more harm?" Mardi Moore with Rocky Mountain Equality told the outlet.
Sell claimed that if a child is at risk, the school should be going to child protective services.
“If it doesn't rise to the level of going to the child services system, then you shouldn't just keep parents out of the process totally,” he said.