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.
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?
It’s not an easy decision. You are taking it on face value that the child is right. I have seen many children afraid to tell their parents something that they think will upset them, only for the parents to be totally cool with it. It’s very common.
Now, if you truly believe that the child is right, I do think there’s still a moral difference between not telling the parents and actively lying to them if they ask.
If asked, I think that probably the correctest decision is probably to refuse to answer and tell the parents that’s a conversation they need to have with their child? Idk.
I’ve seen a scenario where the parents were actively beating their kid if he got good grades because they wanted their kid to fail out. Should the school have lied to the parents about what grades he was getting? CPS refused to remove the kid from the home. What should the school have done in that scenario?
Ultimately, I think navigating when and how the state intervenes in parenting is tricky. It’s very case by case, and in most scenarios there aren’t really good answers. What’s the line where kids are taken away? What’s the line where the courts mandate training or intervention in the home? What’s the line where the state starts just actively lying to the parents about their child to protect them? If you’ve crossed the lying line, why haven’t you crossed the removal line?
I don’t know that there’s a good answer to a lot of these questions. But in general, I think that the state hiding things is usually the wrong answer.
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.
I think it’s probably more analogous than you are painting it as. The trans community suffers elevated levels of suicide risk, and parents who are in the dark about what their child is going through are less equipped to get them the help they need if they need it. Parents of trans kids often have to get them emergency mental health services due to them being bullied or ostracized. If the parents are kept in the dark about it, they may not see the problem until it is too late.
And I agree that children aren’t property, but they also aren’t fully independent agents. Children need guidance. Children need to be raised by parents who love them and are involved in steering them to be a successful and active participant in society. Children should not be allowed to make every decision for themselves without question. They need to be required by an authority figure to eat their vegetables and brush their teeth.
They have agency certainly, but not unlimited agency, and we need to figure out what the left and right bounds of that agency are. And that will change as they age and get older, and will be different from child to child even. But who decides that? My gut is that it’s the parents. I feel like every other option is unpalatable.