Michigan parents sue school district for using male pronouns, different name for daughter: suit
An outraged Michigan couple alleged a school district referred to their autistic teen daughter with a different name and male pronouns without their knowledge or consent.
Dan and Jennifer Mead filed a lawsuit Monday against the Rockford Public School District and its board of education, claiming the district’s policies violated their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights when it didn’t notify and concealed that it was treating their daughter like a male, according to the lawsuit shared by the law firm Alliance Defending Freedom.
The Meads’ daughter, now 14, and listed as G.M. in the court documents, is biologically female but identifies as male.
“Until the fall of 2022, Dan and Jennifer Mead had no reason to suspect the Rockford Public School District would conceal from them important information about the education and health of their daughter,” the lawsuit alleged.
The Meads were first tipped off about the district’s actions after receiving a doctored report from a school neuropsychologist referring to their daughter that included a masculine name.
The district’s policy, practice, usage and custom is to refer to students by names and pronouns associated with the opposite sex without notifying their parents or seeking parental consent and to conceal these actions from their parents.
“No one with the school district told them that the school district had begun to treat her as a boy by calling her a masculine name and by male pronouns,” Vincent Wagner, an attorney for the parents, told WOODTV.
The Meads’ daughter had been enrolled in the school district since kindergarten and began attending East Rockford Middle School in August 2020 as a sixth-grader when she first began seeing one of the school’s counselors, Erin Cole.
Jennifer Mead and Cole allegedly had an “open correspondence” regarding G.M.’s visits to the counselor’s office throughout the year to discuss “important details about G.M.’s education, health, and wellbeing, mostly via emails.”
In January 2022, the Meads learned their daughter was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (without intellectual or language impairment), along with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder, the lawsuit states.
The Meads shared the report with Cole and the school district, assuming it would ensure their daughter would get more help from the school, with the counselor telling Jennifer Mead she would be meeting with other district staff to discuss a plan to support G.M.
On May 4, 2022, G.M. sent a message directly to Cole using a school-specific computer program, asking her counselor to notify all her teachers to begin using a male name when speaking to her.
“Hi Could you email my teachers and tell them to call me F[ ]?” the message read, with “F” being a common masculine name in the US.
After being told about the name and pronoun change, Cole continued to message the Meads about their child using only “G.M.” and using she/her pronouns and failed to tell them about the message she received from the student days prior.
As G.M. entered the eighth grade, the school district’s neuropsychologist Heather Slater “began keeping a handwritten ‘Case Activity Log’ about G.M.,” marking the top of the sheet with both the feminine and masculine name and “F but Trans,” meaning female but transgendered.
District employees had begun to regularly use the masculine name to refer to G.M. along with male pronouns “as though she were a boy” in September, the lawsuit claims.
In October, Slater sent G.M.’s REED evaluation to the Meads with one section containing comments from one teacher referring to an “F.M.”
Jennifer Mead responded to Slater about a potential mistake but was shocked to learn that her daughter was being treated as a male at school.
Slater admitted to the school’s principal that she had forgotten to edit the one teacher’s comments to delete all mention of the masculine name and pronouns as she had done with other sections of the report.
The neuropsychologist defended her actions by saying, “It’s just the policy for legal documents.”
The district’s website states, “District has adopted a nonmandatory guidance document from the Michigan Department of Education as the RPS policy for treating students as the opposite sex,” according to the document.
The Meads pulled their daughter out of public school and began homeschooling on Oct. 24, 2022.
The parents are seeking nominal damages, compensatory damages, and such other damages to which they may be entitled, along with reasonable attorneys’ fees, and court costs.
