Christian parents filed a legal challenge against their local government school district after staff members allegedly tried to “socially transition” their daughter into a male.

Dan and Jennifer Mead learned that East Rockford Middle School in Michigan had started to call their thirteen-year-old daughter by a male name and refer to her with male pronouns. The lawsuit said they only discovered their daughter was treated as a male because an “employee forgot to remove the masculine name and male pronouns” from one section of her records, even after removing the name and pronouns “from other sections of the same document.”

“By intentionally concealing from the Meads important information about their daughter’s education and health, on a subject as morally fraught as gender confusion, the district denied them these constitutional rights,” the lawsuit said. “Absent extraordinary circumstances, a school district’s concealment from parents of such information violates the Constitution. The district did not attempt to justify its actions here based on any extraordinary circumstances. Those actions were not rationally related to any legitimate purpose.”

The daughter fell behind in her schoolwork in the fall of 2020, prompting her to consistently visit the school guidance counselor. Her parents also took her to a psychologist who diagnosed her with autism, and by the spring of 2022 she had emailed her guidance counselor to request that her teachers call her by a male name. The lawsuit noted that the requested name change was not included in frequent correspondence between the guidance counselor and Jennifer Mead.

Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Kate Anderson said in a statement that only parents “have the right to direct the upbringing, education, and healthcare of their children.”

“District employees didn’t even notify Dan and Jennifer, let alone seek their consent, before beginning to call their young daughter by a masculine name and male pronouns,” she said. “Worse, district policy required employees to alter official records to conceal the district’s actions. By intentionally concealing this information from the Meads, the school district violated their constitutionally protected right to make decisions regarding their daughter’s education and wellbeing and destroyed the trust the Mead family had placed in the district and its employees.”