(LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge has cleared the way for a pair of Michigan parents to sue a school district they accuse of “socially transitioning” their daughter without their knowledge or consent.
Back in 2022, Dan and Jennifer Mead pulled their autistic daughter from East Rockford Middle School upon discovering that school employees had been referring to her daughter by a male name and pronouns behind their backs, going so far as to alter records to hide the action. They filed a lawsuit against Rockford Public School District in December 2023, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
On September 18, Judge Paul Maloney of the Western District of Michigan ruled on the district’s motion to dismiss the suit. He agreed to dismiss the parents’ claim that their free exercise of religion was violated, but found that they raised “sufficient factual allegations to support a claim for a violation of Plaintiffs’ fundamental rights as parents in the care, custody and control of their child, a right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The court also finds the complaint states a claim under the Fourteenth Amendment for deprivation of liberty without due process.”
“The right of parents to direct their children’s upbringing originated from three Supreme Court cases: Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), and Farrington v. Tokushige (1927),” Maloney wrote. “The Court affirmed the life of this right in Troxel v. Granville (2000). There, the Court held that ‘the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children [] is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interest recognized by this Court.’ … In addition, parents have a fundamental right to control their child’s health. See Parham v. J.R. (1979). ‘The law’s concept of the family rests on a presumption that parents possess what a child lacks in maturity, experience, and capacity for judgment required for making life’s difficult decisions.’ So ‘[s]urely, [a parent’s right] includes a ‘high duty’ to recognize symptoms of illness and to seek and follow medical advice.’”
“Parents have the right to direct the upbringing, education, and health care of their children—without government interference,” responded ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson. “Schools should never hide vital information from parents, yet that’s exactly what the Rockford Public School District did. District employees didn’t even notify Dan and Jennifer Mead—let alone seek their consent—before beginning to call their young daughter by a masculine name and male pronouns. Worse, district policy required altering official records to conceal the district’s actions.”
“By intentionally concealing this information from the Meads, the school district violated their constitutional right as parents to make decisions about their daughter’s upbringing, education, and healthcare,” “We will continue to work toward final victory for the Mead family.”
It is a dictate of progressivism that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically-based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
President Donald Trump has issued executive orders to deny federal funds to medical and educational entities that promote gender ideology, which so far have gotten numerous major hospital systems to cease “transition” procedures on minors.
