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.
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.