California Teachers File Lawsuit Against School District Over Transgender Policy
Jose Nino
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Teachers in the Escondido Union School District in San Diego County, California filed a lawsuit in federal court over policies that they claim compel them to hide the transgender status of young students from parents.
The lawsuit was filed after President Joe Biden’s comments earlier in support of the nation’s teacher of the year, which made parents angry after he suggested that the government knows how to best raise children.
Biden quoted the teacher when he declared, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.” The president subsequently commented, “Our nation’s children are all our children.”
Matthew Vadum of the Epoch Times Nord observed that the legal complaint (pdf) in the new case, Mirabelli v. Olson, was filed on April 27, 2023 in the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The teachers who are active parties in the lawsuit are devout Christians.
The defendants in this case are Escondido Union School District (EUSD) officials and California State Board of Education officials.
The K-8 school district’s recent policies with regards transgender or gender-diverse students motivated the filing of this lawsuit.
These policies mandate teachers to help with a student’s transgender “social transition” by accepting a child’s proclamation of a transgender or gender-diverse identity. In addition, during school hours, the teachers must use any pronouns or a gender-specific name that a student requests.
Furthermore, the policies require teachers to go back to biological pronouns and legal names when talking to parents in order to conceal information about a child’s self-proclaimed gender identity from the child’s parents,per theThomas More Society, a non-profit public interest law firm that brought forth the lawsuit.
“All of this is to be done without parent or guardian agreement or knowledge,” noted Paul Jonna, the Thomas More Society special counsel and a partner at LiMandri and Jonna.
“Schools routinely send notes home to parents about trivial matters, like missing homework, so it is unfathomable that Escondido Union School District has a policy that forces teachers to withhold from parents some of the most fundamental and basic information about their children,” Jonna added.
EUSD mandates all elementary and middle school teachers to “unhesitatingly accept a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender diverse identity, and … [to] ‘begin to treat the student immediately’ according to their asserted gender identity,” per the legal complaint.
“There is absolutely no room for discussion, polite disagreement, or even questioning whether the child is sincere or acting on a whim,” the lawsuit added. “Once a child’s social transitioning has begun, EUSD elementary and middle school teachers must ensure that parents do not find out.
EUSD’s policies state that ‘revealing a student’s transgender status to individuals who do not have a legitimate need for the information, without the student’s consent’ is prohibited, and ‘parents or caretakers’ are, according to EUSD, individuals who ‘do not have a legitimate need for the information,’ irrespective of the age of the student or the specific facts of the situation.”
Jonna noted that since the early 2000s there have been anti-discrimination laws and “it’s always been unlawful to discriminate against someone based on their sexual orientation, and later on, they added gender identity.”
However, she observed that there has never been a California law that requires schools to enforce the policies that this school district is enacting, Jonna said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“What they’re basically doing is interpreting the law in a way that requires in the name of anti-discrimination allowing children to assert a gender identity and requiring teachers to accept the children’s assertion of their gender identity, and then immediately treating the student according to that asserted gender identity, and forcing teachers and school administrators to keep that confidential.”
The gender identity information has confidential status and parents are treated as people who do not have a legitimate need to know, he pointed out.
The teachers who filed the lawsuit received a partial accommodation from the school district that let them use the children’s last name instead of their preferred pronouns. However, the district “would not budge at all on the parental exclusion policies,” which they say protect the privacy of the minor children, he observed.
Jonna expressed his shock with how these policies are “becoming much more common on a nationwide scale.”
“I’m seeing school districts across the U.S. enacting similar policies and it seems to be spreading,” the lawyer commented.
“I think almost 90 percent of children who have these gender confusion, gender dysphoria issues, have other comorbid psychiatric diagnoses, and so many of them have a history of self-harm, suicidal ideation, and symptoms of distress, and keeping parents out of the loop is going to make the problem worse,” Jonna added.
“A school should partner with parents in the process, not substitute them. I think there is a basic civil right that goes back to the founding of our country that parents have a right to raise their own children,” he concluded.
Such cases are commonplace in the current day US. The cultural Left is dedicated to destroying the family structure. They’re already doing so by kidnapping children and throwing them in government-sponsored daycares aka public schools. Moreover, they’re doubling down by using woke transgender policies to foster divisions between children and their parents. The whole name of the game here is to destroy family bonds which will allow these leftist radicals to fill in this vacuum by having the state or woke entities effectively raise children and turn into complete degenerates.
The Right must resoundingly oppose such social engineering schemes and take a stand for traditional values. We simply cannot let these freaks churn out millions of degenerates via the public school system and create new generations of leftist radicals, thereby establishing leftist hegemony.
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