NY School District Sued For Allegedly Secretly Transitioning 12-Year-Old Student
School counselors don’t just give career advice anymore.
The steady stream of parental notification cases continued last week when yet another school was sued for allegedly secretly transitioning one of its students to the opposite gender.
On January 31st, New York mother Jennifer Vitsaxaki filed a federal complaint against the Skaneateles Central School District, alleging school staff were treating her 12-year-old daughter “Jane” as a boy, referring to her with a new masculine name and new third-person pronouns—all without her parents’ knowledge or consent.
We’ve covered the ongoing controversy over secret social transitioning in public schools here:
- NJ Father Sues State Over Secret Gender Transitioning Policy
- After Male Students Protested To Protect Female Classmates, Pennsylvania High School Nixes Transgender Bathroom Policy
- Groundbreaking Win For Parents: WI State Court Rules Against School’s Secret Gender Transitioning Policy
- Missouri AG Sues School Board Over Secret Transgender Bathroom Policy Meetings
- California Federal Court Says Teachers Don’t Have to Comply With School’s Secret Gender Transitioning Policy
- First Circuit Court of Appeals Hears Oral Argument in School Secret Social Transitioning Case
- California Court Blocks School District’s Gender Notification Policy
- NJ Governor Sues Schools To Halt Parental Notification Of Gender Social Transitioning of Their Kids
- Maryland Parents Can’t Sue School Over Policy On Secret Gender Transitioning, Federal Appeals Court Rules
- Federal Courts Allowing Secret Social Transitioning in Schools, Rebuff Parents’ Rights
This case caught my attention because it features an often-overlooked figure: the “school counselor.” Cases like Vitsaxaki show how critical these staff members can be in socially transitioning a student.
It’s a point my friend @ALegalProcess has been hammering away at for months: “School counselors” or “guidance counselors” don’t just give career advice anymore. They play an active part in the “identify-transition-and-conceal” regime in public schools. And, unlike their licensed private-practice counterparts, they are essentially unregulated and unaccountable to parents.
In Vitsaxaki, it was the school counselor who set Jane down the path toward social transitioning. According to the complaint, she was going through a rough time: the family had recently moved from Greece, and as she struggled to adjust to life in her new country, she also began to struggle with anxiety and depression. She didn’t want to go to school. She met regularly with the school counselor, who repeatedly assured the worried mother there was nothing to worry about.
Nothing, except that in seventh grade, the lawsuit says, Jane asked the school counselor if she could be called by a new name and pronouns, just like she saw others do on YouTube. And just like other kids in her school had done. She saw how, once they asked, the school readily set them up as the opposite sex.
And so it did with Jane, according to the complaint. Shortly after meeting with her, the school counselor emailed staff to inform them they should call Jane by her new masculine name and use the ambiguous “they” and “them” third-person pronouns instead of “she” and “her.”
Jane had already consulted her friends, the school counselor explained in the email. As for her parents? They could wait. “I will follow up with her after break to see what the plan is for discussing this change with their [sic] parents,” he wrote.
Once Jane was signed up, the school kicked into gear, creating a “Gender Support Plan” and “gender support team” to help her transition, according to the complaint. She was frequently pulled out of class and even lunch to attend meetings where she and her peers were encouraged to discuss their new gender identities. These sessions in turn spawned an “LGBTQ club” where Jane and other students were prodded to take their social transitioning next level, changing their dress and grooming habits as well as restroom and locker facilities.
The goal of the meetings was clear: permanent, life-altering medical transitioning. The complaint says Jane was told she could choose to change her biological sex to solve her problems in life. The school gave her contact information for a local gender clinic as well as information on where to obtain “breast binders.” All this “guidance” was provided without her parents’ knowledge or consent.
The school didn’t need it. School policy directed staff to deceive parents by using Jane’s given name and pronouns when talking to her mother, while using her new masculine set at school, the complaint alleges. In fact, to read through the lawsuit, the parents might never have found out if not for one of Jane’s teachers who could no longer keep up the charade. She pressured the principal into calling Jane’s parents, according to the complaint.
And when he did, the lawsuit says he presented her daughter’s decision as a fait accompli: Jane was becoming a boy, and the school was helping her do it.
Taking that decision out of her hands, Vitsaxaki claims, violated her constitutional rights, including her parental rights to direct her daughters’ upbringing, education, and healthcare.
And it all began with the school counselor, who, @ALegal process points out, can treat students without parental consent:
Even in New York, Licensed Mental Health Counselors Cannot Treat a Minor Without Parent Consent, by @ALegalProcess https://t.co/iqRycCcKnK pic.twitter.com/hFHav3mbzI
— TheLegalProcess (v2.0 | Post-Election Ed) (@ALegalProcess) February 1, 2024
@ALegalProcess says these school counselors couldn’t lie to parents and treat minors if they were licensed and working across the street from the schoolhouse. But in a school, the only limits on applying their “support services” are district policies, not rules of professional conduct enforced by a licensing board.
And those district policies require them to lie.
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Comments
Pure criminality …. of the worst sort.
These people REALLY need to be put away. Really.
How many of the counselors are deviants?
This will keep happening until there are televised perp walks.
Troxel was a very clear decision. Parental rights are established. Schools should have better legal counsel… I hope this case bites the school board.
TY Jane, great article.
A Michigan jury found Jennifer Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter on Tuesday after her son, Ethan Crumbley shot four students to death at Oxford High School in 2021.
Don’t get this wrong. This jury has said that parents are responsible for their children. Notice how they didn’t indict or convict any school teachers or administrators. This sets a clear path of responsibility.
Ethan Crumbly was tried and convicted as an adult! If he was an adult, how could she have been responsible? He was no longer a child, the prosecutor said.
IMO, that’s a really bad decision. Go after the Parents for purchasing a weapon ‘for their Son’ if the Govt can prove it. That’s a reasonable charge. If Michigan has a gun storage law and it was violated by the Parents use that statute. The Parents can not prevent their teen from doing X. If they could then teen pregnancy wouldn’t happen.
There were all sorts of warning signs with this young man that no one really wanted to see/use as a basis to put him into involuntary care. The friends, classmates, Teachers, school counselors/administrators all dropped the ball in addition to the Parents.
These Parents were not models to emulate for sure. For the govt to say well they are bad parents b/c their lifestyle was x, y, z or their parenting skills were deficient in A, B, C at Trial is bogus. Why didn’t the govt intervene and remove the young man from these ‘unfit’ Parents before this occurred?
This decision, if it stands, will have very bad consequences for Parents down the line. Not to mention the inevitable impact on foster care and adoption. Becoming the guardian of a child exposes you to criminal liability for their acts of the child? Single Mothers trying to find a Husband just had their odds reduced as well.
Umm. The govt. didn’t say they were “bad” parents (btw, the father’s case has not yet been heard) but rather that the mother directly contributed to the death of four students by abetting the purchase of a lethal weapon to a child who was clearly mentally disturbed and depressed.And yes, she was also extremely negligent.
They do this in MA, and it is enshrined in the Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) regulations (https://www.doe.mass.edu/sfs/lgbtq/genderidentity.html)
To wit:
The responsibility for determining a student’s gender identity rests with the student or, in the case of young students not yet able to advocate for themselves, with the parent.5 One’s gender identity is an innate, largely inflexible characteristic of each individual’s personality that is generally established by age four, although the age at which individuals come to understand and express their gender identity may vary based on each person’s social and familial social development.6 As a result, the person best situated to determine a student’s gender identity is that student himself or herself.”
So essentially, to MA DESE, after age four, the student alone is responsible for his/her/its gender identity. Nice, huh?
“Some transgender and gender nonconforming students are not openly so at home for reasons such as safety concerns or lack of acceptance. School personnel should speak with the student first before discussing a student’s gender nonconformity or transgender status with the student’s parent or guardian. For the same reasons, school personnel should discuss with the student how the school should refer to the student, e.g., appropriate pronoun use, in written communication to the student’s parent or guardian.”
And parents? Who needs them?
“When determining which, if any, staff or students should be informed that a student’s gender identity is different from the assigned birth sex, decisions should be made in consultation with the student, or in the case of a young student, the student’s parent or guardian. The key question is whether and how sharing the information will benefit the student.”
So hide the gender falderal from the parents unless the child determines it is okay to tell them, if ever, or the school admins decide it is okay to tell the parents. In consultation with the brainwashed student, of course.
Systemic child abuse.
What do you expect from a dyke Governor? Defining deviancy down makes her appear less aberrant.
It takes more than a governor to make law.
Yes, Jane has covered a case in MA as well. You can read about the role of professional licensing – and lack thereof for school-based mental health workers – here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/alegalprocess/p/ma-school-counselor-conceals-gender?r=u2s3f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Skaneateles is seen as one of the best school districts in the state of NY. So, they have a 95% or more of students are reading at a ‘Proficient Level,’ right? Nope. 77%…is all it takes to be seen as one of the best districts in the state. A QUARTER of their students aren’t reading at their grade level. Statewide, just 46% of 3rd-graders are reading at a proficient level. 46%.
Horace Mann – the Massachusetts’s legislator who is widely held to be the father of public education in America – believed that while his school system is secular in nature, it ‘earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals based on religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible.’ Under Mann’s stewardship of education in MA, every public school in MA issued a Bible to students just as it issued other text books, What would Mann think about schools today?
The progressives who have been in charge of public education in this country since the end of the WWII have replaced the Christian principles that were commonly a part of the curriculum with the principles of another religion, Secular Humanism…and that process has now ended with predictable results.
And now we have a gay, apostate pope who blesses homosexual unions- all explained with a convoluted, mealy mouthed footnote. At least 20,000 religious have signed an open letter decrying this directive from the be-robed spawn of Satan.
I won’t comment on “apostate”; he has certainly made “Is the Pope Catholic” no longer a rhetorical question, and he has a lot of people now wondering whether they’ve been wrong all this time about bears’ excretory habits.
Nor do I have any idea who he would be with were he not celibate.
But he does not bless homosexual unions, and does not permit priests to do so. He was very clear about this. If a same-sex couple ask a priest to bless them he can do so, just as he can bless anyone who asks for it, but he cannot bless their union.
One can be celibate and homosexual, but if frisky Francis is now celibate it is only through impotence. Thousands of leading church faithful think our bent, recreant vicegerent is deliberately murky about these blessings. If anyone can be blessed at any time as individuals what is the purpose of asking those sharing the same perversion to arrange to appear as a couple to receive individual blessings? This is arrant nonsense and diabolical casuistry.
Nobody has asked them to do so. The Pope’s guidance was clear on this. If a couple present themselves to a priest and ask him to bless them, the priest may do so. There had been an earlier instruction that he could not do so, for fear that it would be mistaken for a blessing for their union; the new instruction clarified this. That’s all.
Proponents of mental health workers in school cite studies showing their counseling services improve academic outcomes…and yet it never plays out that way. Time and again student outcomes, on average, do not improve. So what’s the response? MORE counselors!
Research has shown that 85% of little girls want to be a princess. Perhaps they could hire Meghan Markle to help them transistion. She’s the world’s foremost expert on the process.
I’ve heard that lots of little kids want to grow up to be President. Maybe Biden is giving little girls presidential advice when it looks like all he is doing is sniffing them.
In fact, he does. He gives them all the same advice. I read somewhere what it was, it was so banal I completely forgot what it was. It was something like, “don’t let them tell you there’s anything you can’t do.” A particularly ironic piece of advice, because it might’ve saved America if enough people had told Biden what he was not cut out to do.
Biden is like the famous rapper who’s so stupid he thinks he’s smart. In Biden’s case, his mind has deteriorated to the point that everyone knows it—except he himself:
a. can’t carry out daily activities normally
b. mood changes like whispering for emphasis
c. can’t answer questions without promptings
d. trouble with balance
e. says off the wall things unrelated to the topic at hand
f. needs help locating entrances and exits
g. loses balance easily
Because by the time he gets to g he’s already forgotten d.
I noticed it right after I hit the submit button. I reached confidently for the edit button, then realized I had forgotten there wasn’t one.
You can blame my wife. I am posting with her account so it will look like she did it. Peabody never makes mistakes. Ha ha.
I thought Peabody was a myopic dog with a pet boy called Sherman.
People who do this to kids deserve to be thrown into the sea with millstones tied to their necks.
And if you run out of millstones, use cinderblocks.
JDDelay on YouTube is an advocate of the wood chipper.
Its child abuse, should be illegal. Its like encouraging delusional child they can fly, giving them paper wings, and pushing them off the roof. Then claiming non-responsibility when they commit suicide or de-transition.
In Florida this is complicated as well. As a school psychologist ( which I am) you hold an educational certificate from the state and follow the state policy which is interpreted by your district in sometimes disparate ways. I wouldn’t say that your counseling services are unregulated but they are guided more by educational policy than medical or mental health guidelines. In Florida we can only see a child if they are in acute crisis without consent. After that we need consent from a parent/guardian , however the acute crisis part is interpreted of course in a variety of ways and hence the confusion and complications. Personally I never see a child for regular counseling without parental consent and I always notify and attempt to talk to parents if I saw your child for any type of crisis. While this sometimes has gotten me in trouble with administration that wanted me to avoid “difficult” parents , I always think about it in terms of how I would feel about my own children. Also educational policy is constantly being re written and modified so it often leads to problems whereby districts are not up to date in understanding new policies or don’t know how to implement them correctly. Of course politics is heavily involved is misinterpreting laws as well and the whole thing is often a confusing mess leaving fewer and fewer people wanting to go into this field.
Lefty says
this is why we must STOP THE STIGMA of saying people with mental problems should be hospitalized
when all they need is a treacherous government to support them in allllll ways
when people become PROPERTY OF THE STATE
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
whats that called ??
oh yeah
sl
av
ery
The goal of every socialist/communist/Democrat.
Ace of Spades ran one last week on Olympia School District doing same and then the teacher stalking the kid after her parents fled the state (and then moved back to India).
Note at Olympia School District, they are broke and laying off teachers and staff.
Do you know who IS NOT getting laid off? The grooming counselors who were hired with COVID money to push BLM / LGBQT agenda items.
Note there is still a ton of this COVID money sitting in gov pockets waiting to get handed out to which ever special interest they can hide under.
Jason Rantz (Fox, and local radio guy in Wa) bust ~300 M going to illegals up through 2023… in fat checks.
“Gender transitioning” is medical. It should not be undertaken without the advice and supervision of a team of appropriately licensed medical professionals – After the patient has reached an appropriate age and has gone through the appropriate screening and evaluation processes. When it is done by people who are not legally allowed to hand the “patient” an Tylenol tablet, a lawsuit is absolutely in order. I hope they include terms like “practicing medicine without a license” and “recless endangerment of a minor” while they are at it.
“Gender transitioning” are performed by Frankensteins and should be jailed!
They’re not medically transitioning, just socially. So no drugs, no prescriptions, just brainwashing.
And do pardon my spelling. I see more than one error there.
This is all school policy now dictated by the state
https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/student-support-services/creating-a-safe-supportive-and-affirming-school-environment-for-transgender-and-gender-expansive-students.pdf
On the one hand we have a mother being held accountable for not getting mental health assistance to her son. Meanwhile, parents who want to get mental health assistance for their children over gender dysphoria are blocked, and the government is in favor of the schools hiding such things from the parents.
There is no science anymore; only narrative.