Two religious parents filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the Anne Arundel County Public School District of Maryland for allegedly “socially transitioning” their child with a masculine name and pronouns without notifying them.
The parents, identified in court documents only as John and Jane Doe, are being represented by America First Legal (AFL), an anti-LGBTQ+ conservative legal organization. The parents want school officials to start misgendering their child and for the judge to declare the school district’s trans-inclusive name and pronoun policies as illegal. The school district has declined to comment on the case.
The lawsuit, filed in Maryland’s U.S. District Court, says the school began referring to the child with a masculine name and pronouns at the beginning of the school year at the student’s request. The parents only became aware of this last December 10 when the school emailed the parents about a lab experiment happening in class the next day. The email used a male name to refer to their child, The Baltimore Banner reported.
The staff member who sent the email reportedly tried to unsend it and then sent the parents a message saying that the email wasn’t intended to go to them, the lawsuit said. The following day, the parents allegedly spoke to the staff member who “admitted to lying in the emails” and informed the parents that their child had requested the masculine name and pronouns, the lawsuit adds.
What if people didn’t keep coming up with slippery slope bullshit and just addressed what actually happened?
A slippery slope is saying “if we allow thing 1, then later we will allow thing 2.” That’s not what I’m saying at all.
I’m saying the current thing makes me uneasy, and trying to clarify the left and right bounds of when that one thing is okay to do, if it ever is.
I think we can all come up with instances where it’s wrong for the school to lie to parents. If you catch a kid smoking for instance, it shouldn’t be acceptable for the school to not tell the parents. And it should be doubly unacceptable if the parents ask for the school to lie to them about it.
Schools aren’t perfect. What I’m about to say might actually be a slippery slope, but if schools are allowed to lie to parents about their children, I don’t think it’s a far leap to say they will lie to cover up bullying and abuse to prevent themselves from being sued or held accountable. Bad schools can be just as bad at being a safe place for kids as bad parents.
But aside from that, I think there’s an important meta conversation to be had about what a parent’s responsibility to their child is. I think in addition to the obvious of providing a safe and loving home, a parent is responsible for raising their child to be a good member of society. It concerns me when the state begins to take that responsibility away from parents and put it on itself.
Now, sometimes that is something the state needs to do. If a child is being actively abused, the parents should be sent to prison, and the state should (in absence of another parental figure that can take in the child and is willing to do so) assume custody of that child. In which case it is the states responsibility to raise that child into a good and responsible member of society.
But these weird half measures where the state says, “you’re not an abusive enough parent for us to take your children away from you, but we don’t like the way you’re raising them enough that we’re gonna actively lie to you about what your child is doing at school,” feel bad to me.
Let’s take the pronouns out of it. Suppose you have a child named Elizabeth who wants to be called “Beth”. This child tells the teacher “please don’t tell my parents that I’m going by Beth; they’ll beat me if you do”. In a rational world, the teacher would be able to report this as the child abuse it is. But imagine this teacher lives in a city/state/country where the judicial system refuses to prosecute nickname-related beatings as child abuse.
What is the morally correct action for this teacher to take?
You are making a slippery slope argument because you’re taking a situation involving schools respecting a preferred name and pronouns and turning it into an argument about a child killing themselves and the school hiding the warning signs from parents.
If you were really concerned about children self harming, you shouldn’t be arguing that the state act as a snitch in a situation like this. Calling someone “he” instead of “her” or calling them by a name other than what’s on their birth certificate by request isn’t going to lead to physical or mental harm. Ratting a kid out to their bigoted parents when they’ve specifically asked you not to very likely will lead to physical and mental harm. These children aren’t property of the parents and they should be given some agency over their own lives as human beings.