A court has ruled that a couple’s lawsuit against a Michigan school district over concealing their daughter’s gender identity change from them can proceed.
Dan and Jennifer Mead filed a complaint against Rockford Public School District officials over its policy of keeping their daughter’s self-declared gender identity a secret from her parents.
United States District Judge Paul Maloney, a George W. Bush appointee, issued an opinion and order last week that partly denied and granted a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Maloney wrote that the lawsuit “contains 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.”
“Defendants have not met their burden to show how concealing a child’s gender transition from its parents promotes that child’s safety,” wrote Maloney, noting that “school employees did not keep G.M.’s gender transition private. School employees used G.M. by her preferred masculine name openly and publicly at school.”
“The Supreme Court has long held that parents possess a right to direct their children’s health care, upbringing, and education. Plaintiffs have pled sufficient facts to plausibly show that the District’s policy and practice infringes on that right.”
Maloney also found that “the complaint states a claim under the Fourteenth Amendment for deprivation of liberty without due process,” although he also decided to dismiss “Plaintiffs’ free exercise cause of action.”
The court also rejected the claim that “the District has conditioned the privilege of their child attending public school on their willingness to abandon their sincere religious beliefs.”
“The District allows its students to request their preferred name and pronouns,” he added. “In no way does that compel students or their parents to recognize a preferred name or pronouns of the opposite sex.”
The Mead family is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit law firm that has won First Amendment cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Parents have the right to direct the upbringing, education, and health care of their children — without government interference,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson, director of ADF’s Center for Parental Rights, in a statement last Friday.
“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.”
The Meads filed their lawsuit in December 2023, claiming that employees at East Rockford Middle School treated their 13-year-old daughter as a boy after she reportedly told a school counselor that she identified as a male.
According to the parents, the school then hid their daughter’s social transition from them by deceptively changing her records before they were sent home. The Meads reportedly became aware of the deception by accident when a school employee failed to change one of the records.
When Dan Mead asked school officials to stop referring to his daughter by a male name and pronouns, they refused to do so, citing the school district’s policy on gender identity.
