Parents sue school district for 'intentionally' transitioning daughter without their consent
(Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash)
By Kate Anderson
Daily Caller News Foundation
Two parents filed a lawsuit Monday against a Michigan school district after discovering that their daughter’s middle school was allegedly socially transitioning her without their knowledge.
Dan and Jennifer Mead claim that they discovered that their daughter, G.M., who was attending East Rockford Middle School in the 2022 school year, was going by male pronouns and a different name and that the school tried to cover it up, according to the lawsuit. The Meads, who are being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said that they initially had no reason to suspect anything because the school had previously been upfront with them about any issues involving their daughter.
“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 lawsuit reads. “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.”
LGBT activists and their supporters rally in support of transgender people on the steps of New York City Hall, on October 24, 2018, in New York City. The group gathered to speak out against the Trump administration’s stance toward transgender people. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The school allegedly continued to refer to the Meads’ daughter as a male, despite them communicating that they did not consent to it, according to the lawsuit. The Meads eventually decided to homeschool in late 2022 after their daughter came home with a book titled Heartstopper Volume 1, a graphic novel that depicts “one teenage boy physically assaulting and later forcibly kissing another teenage boy without his consent,” that was allegedly provided by the school counselor, Erin Cole.
School staff repeatedly cited that their behavior was in line with school policy and, when Mr. Mead asked Principal Adam Burkholder whether the school would promise to notify them about this issue in the future, Burkholder allegedly refused, according to the lawsuit.
“District employees didn’t even notify Dan and Jennifer—let alone seek their consent—before beginning to call their young daughter by a masculine name and male pronouns,” Kate Anderson, senior counsel and director of ADF’s Center for Parental Rights, said in a press release. “By intentionally concealing this information from the Meads, the school district violated their constitutionally protected right to make decisions regarding their daughter’s education and wellbeing and destroyed the trust the Mead family had placed in the district and its employees.”
The Rockford Public School District did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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