Parents Sue Houston, TX School For ‘Socially-Transitioning’ Their Daughter To The Opposite Sex
A high school in Houston, Texas, secretly “socially transitioned” one of its students to the opposite sex over her parents’ objections, a federal lawsuit alleges.
The school’s refusal to follow the parents’ instructions regarding their own child was carried out as a matter of official policy, according to the lawsuit. As was also part of that policy, the school neither notified nor sought the consent of the girl’s parents.
In the Houston school system, all a student has to do is ask, and school staff will socially transition them — referring to them with names and pronouns of the opposite sex — behind the parents’ backs, and even against their express instructions, the lawsuit claims.
Houston’s policy mirrors the transgender policies in public schools throughout the country. We’ve covered the ongoing controversy over them here:
What sets this particular case apart from the others is the school’s repeated defiance of the parents’ explicit instructions — oral and written — not to treat their daughter as a boy.
However, unlike in other cases, this wasn’t a situation where the parents came late to the game, finding out only by chance that their child was being “transed.”
Sarah and Terry Osborn knew something was up on the very first day of school, when their daughter’s ninth-grade theater teacher sent her home with a form asking what pronouns to use when referring to her, according to the complaint. The parents say they told the teacher to use female pronouns — and assumed that would be the end of it.
They were wrong. During her sophomore year, the complaint says, members of the school staff, including the same theater teacher, were calling their daughter by a boy’s name and using male pronouns to refer to her. And they did so — the parents discovered in her schoolwork — even after her mother told them to stop.
In a September 24 email to the school, the Osborns made themselves crystal clear.
From the complaint:
WE DEMAND IMMEDIATE NOTIFICATION if [our] child ever expresses a different pronoun, name preference or a different gender from her biological sex, or requests to be treated as any other identity that conflicts with her biological sex.…WE DO NOT CONSENT to any manner of [our] child socially transitioning at school. “Social transitioning” involves treating an individual as something other than her biological sex and includes things such as addressing that person by alternative names and/or pronouns not associated with her biological sex.
The school carried on with this charade for at least two years, according to the lawsuit. Finally, after school officials refused the parents’ repeated demands for information about its gender policy — and for assurances it would stop “transing” their daughter — the parents filed a lawsuit in Texas federal district court.
Their lawsuit claims the school’s transgender policy violates their parental and religious rights under the Constitution, as well as their procedural due process rights, insofar as the school made decisions about their daughter’s education and healthcare without their knowledge and consent.
Several courts have rejected similar claims. They’ve held that parental secrecy policies are necessary to promote a “safe and inclusive” learning environment for students. In a recent ruling, a federal court in New York said the school’s transgender policy was “like a civility code that extends the kind of decency students should expect at school.”
However, as the Texas lawsuit sets out, clinical research has shown that secret social transitioning is not just about being polite. It puts emotionally vulnerable children on the path to permanent, life-altering medical transitioning.
Seen this way, it’s a medical intervention — a choice that should require informed consent like any other involving their child, the lawsuit argues. By using a masculine name and incorrect pronouns for their daugher, the parents say the school “engaged in a psychosocial intervention for gender dysphoria,” a health diagnosis school staff were neither qualified to diagnose, nor authorized to treat.
And, as this lawsuit and others have pointed out, it’s a policy absurdly at odds with other school guidance that forbids the school from administering so much as an aspirin without parental consent.
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