Teachers from a California middle school are suing officials in their school district in federal court over policies that they say force them to conceal the transgender status of young students from parents.
The lawsuit happens to come after President Joe Biden’s remarks earlier this month in support of the nation’s teacher of the year angered parents by suggesting government knows best when it comes to the raising of children.
Biden quoted the teacher when he said, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.” The president then said, “Our nation’s children are all our children.”
The defendants are officials with the Escondido Union School District (EUSD), which is in San Diego County, and officials with the California State Board of Education.
The lawsuit was prompted by the K-8 school district’s recent policies affecting transgender or gender-diverse students.
The policies require teachers to assist in a student’s transgender “social transition” by accepting a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender-diverse identity and using during school hours any pronouns or a gender-specific name requested by a student.
At the same time, the policies also require teachers to revert to biological pronouns and legal names when speaking with parents in order to cover up information about a child’s purported gender identity from the child’s parents, according to the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit public interest law firm that filed the lawsuit.
“All of this is to be done without parent or guardian agreement or knowledge,” said Paul Jonna, Thomas More Society special counsel and a partner at LiMandri and Jonna.
“Schools routinely send notes home to parents about trivial matters, like missing homework, so it is unfathomable that Escondido Union School District has a policy that forces teachers to withhold from parents some of the most fundamental and basic information about their children,” Jonna said.
EUSD requires all elementary and middle school teachers to “unhesitatingly accept a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender diverse identity, and … [to] ‘begin to treat the student immediately’ according to their asserted gender identity,” according to the legal complaint.
“There is absolutely no room for discussion, polite disagreement, or even questioning whether the child is sincere or acting on a whim,” the complaint continues. “Once a child’s social transitioning has begun, EUSD elementary and middle school teachers must ensure that parents do not find out.”
“EUSD’s policies state that ‘revealing a student’s transgender status to individuals who do not have a legitimate need for the information, without the student’s consent’ is prohibited, and ‘parents or caretakers’ are, according to EUSD, individuals who ‘do not have a legitimate need for the information,’ irrespective of the age of the student or the specific facts of the situation.”
Jonna said going back to the early 2000s there have been anti-discrimination laws and “it’s always been unlawful to discriminate against someone based on their sexual orientation, and later on, they added gender identity.”
But there has never been a law in California that requires schools to enforce the policies that this school district is implementing, Jonna told The Epoch Times in an interview.
“What they’re basically doing is interpreting the law in a way that requires in the name of anti-discrimination allowing children to assert a gender identity and requiring teachers to accept the children’s assertion of their gender identity, and then immediately treating the student according to that asserted gender identity, and forcing teachers and school administrators to keep that confidential.”
The gender identity information is treated as confidential and parents are regarded as people who do not have a legitimate need to know, he said.
The teachers who filed suit received a partial accommodation from the school district that allowed them to use the children’s last name instead of their preferred pronouns, but the district “would not budge at all on the parental exclusion policies,” which they say protect the privacy of the minor children, he said.
Jonna said he has been surprised to learn from research that these policies are “becoming much more common on a nationwide scale.”
“I’m seeing school districts across the U.S. enacting similar policies and it seems to be spreading,” the lawyer said.
“I think almost 90 percent of children who have these gender confusion, gender dysphoria issues, have other comorbid psychiatric diagnoses, and so many of them have a history of self-harm, suicidal ideation, and symptoms of distress, and keeping parents out of the loop is going to make the problem worse,” Jonna said.
“A school should partner with parents in the process, not substitute them. I think there is a basic civil right that goes back to the founding of our country that parents have a right to raise their own children,” he said.
EUSD Superintendent of Schools, Luis A. Rankins-Ibarra, told The Epoch Times by email: “The Escondido Union School District is committed to providing a safe and positive environment that enables our students to learn and actualize their unlimited potential and that empowers our teachers to excel as educators. As part of that commitment to student learning, the District observes all federal and state laws.”
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to the California State Board of Education but had not received a reply as of press time.
