Federal Court Revives Parents’ First Amendment Challenge to Michigan School’s Transgender Policy
Last year, the court dismissed the parents’ free exercise claim—a decision it now says was likely in error, in light of the Supreme Court’s recent guidance in Mirabelli v. Bonta.
There was more fallout last week from Mirabelli v. Bonta—the Supreme Court’s landmark decision restoring the rights of a group of California parents to be told if their child expresses a new “gender identity” in school.
Now, in light of Mirabelli, a federal district court has revived a First Amendment claim in a similar case brought by parents against a Michigan public school that socially sex-transitioned their daughter behind their backs.
The parents, Dan and Jennifer Mead, say they had no reason to think their daughter’s middle school was hiding anything from them. After all, according to the court filings, the school had always informed them when she was missing assignments or when there were concerns about her mental health. And it had sought their permission for all kinds of decisions, such as whether she could join the track team or a social skills group.
So when the Meads received paperwork from the school referring to their daughter as a boy, they thought there must be a mistake. In fact, there was a mistake: One of the school’s employees had forgotten to remove the masculine name and male pronouns from a section of their daughter’s records and inadvertently given them the partially altered document. But that clerical slip wasn’t the real mistake—the real mistake, from the school’s perspective, was letting the secret out at all.
Under the Michigan school’s policy, unless the student consents, teachers and staff are encouraged to keep a child’s decision to “become” the opposite sex a secret from the parents, referring to her with her preferred name and pronouns in school, but using her legal name and gender on paperwork sent home to hide that information. Similar parental exclusion policies exist nationwide.
The Meads soon discovered that their daughter, an adolescent on the autism spectrum, had messaged the school counselor that she wanted to be referred to as a male. The school readily complied, “socially transitioning” her to the opposite sex—and deliberately hiding it from her parents.
The Meads withdrew their daughter and sued in December 2023, alleging the school’s gender policies violated their religious rights, among other causes of action. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney dismissed the free exercise claim last year. Then came Mirabelli. The parents asked Judge Maloney to reconsider, and last week, he vacated his dismissal, conceding that “Mirabelli calls into question” his earlier reading of the law.
The Supreme Court’s preliminary ruling in Mirabelli blocked the California policies because the parents were likely to succeed on their free exercise and due process claims. Citing Mahmoud v. Taylor, its decision allowing parents to opt out of LGBTQ lessons, the Court held the policies likely trigger strict scrutiny.
Given all this, Judge Maloney acknowledged that his prior ruling, following an unpublished Sixth Circuit opinion’s narrow reading of Mahmoud, was likely in error—and for that reason, the Meads had stated a claim for a violation of the Free Exercise Clause, subject to strict scrutiny under the First Amendment.
This is not the first time Mirabelli has prompted a court to revisit an earlier decision on school gender policies. In June, a federal appeals court vacated and remanded a lower court’s dismissal of a mother’s similar claims against a New York school, as we covered here.
Judge Maloney’s readiness to reconsider his own ruling shows once again that though Mirabelli is an interim, non-binding decision, its message is clear: School gender secrecy policies are unlikely to survive the constitutional challenges brought by the parents they “cut out“—parents who remain “the primary protectors of children’s best interests.”
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Comments
What I would like to see is some school secretly abet the transitioning of a muslim’s child. There isn’t enough popcorn in the world for the chaos that would occur,
I applaud the Mead’s emotional intelligence and patience in doing the right thing by making use of the courts to resolve this unfortunate situation.
I can say without fear of contradiction that if my local school system had tried this with one of my kids I would be serving consecutive sentences.
This is utter madness.
The real problem is they pull this crap with the most vulnerable kids. The kids who have a host of other problems and confusion about gender is just a symptom and not a cause. Also, the schools are never around to clean up the mess that normally results from their intervention.
There should be some serious concern about whether or not people can see any results through the justice system. The other option is vigilantism I don’t think anyone wants to see that. But if that’s the only way to get justice, it will happen.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel thanks to Mirabella.
Question: what is the difference between a school building and a police station? Answer: none. Both are staffed by government employees.
So if the police pull over and arrest the parent driver, the child can be taken to the police station and be in the state’s care until someone arrives to pick him up. The day before, the child was in a school building and under the care of the state until dismissal when the parent picked him up. Yet the government employees in the police station are not allowed to preach gender ideology (or whatever) to the child in their custody. You see where this is going?
This ruling is a major step in cutting the feet of the education mafia.
Nice setup. Wrong conclusion.
What makes you think that “the government employees in the police station are not allowed to preach gender ideology (or whatever) to the child in their custody”?
The problem isn’t the particular government school. It’s all government schools.
The headline gives the court too much credit. One would think the judge went back to the courtroom’s archives and reopened a dead case file all by himself.
In fairness to the Judge he isn’t supposed to dig around old cases and start issuing rulings overturning his prior decisions whenever the prior precedent he relied upon becomes moot. He’s supposed to do so when directed by a higher court or as here when a new motion arrives. He did the right thing when he had the opportunity and applied the new case law…which is more than some Judges seem willing to do in their intransigent TDS.
I agree. I thought the headline treatment was clickbaity.
Ok that makes so much more sense, For a minute I was wondering when/if you had lost your mind and wanted Judges to start issuing decrees on their own hook without any case in front of them.
I can’t remember who said it, but imagine the outrage if teachers were instead baptizing children and preaching the Bible and keeping it a secret from parents.
Get your beautiful, sweet, wonderfully created boys and girls the heck out of these public schools. What’s happening is utter madness, and the result of unchecked progressive leftist activism…sick and twisted…I do pray these school “educators” will be brought to a point where their souls are tormented by what they do and have done.