A conservative law firm is shining a spotlight on gender ideology in schools across the United States by taking action against many districts they say are overstepping their boundaries with parents.
The Alliance Defending Liberty, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, held a news conference Thursday with clients it represents from around the country who are involved in legal actions against their local school districts.
They are supporting a Colorado couple whose 11-year-old daughter was assigned to a room with a boy who identified as a girl on a school trip to Washington, DC.
They represent Michigan parents who sued their local school district for using male pronouns for their eighth-grade children without their knowledge.
And they represent a Virginia teacher who claims her district ordered her to hide students’ gender identity information from their parents, among others.
“The government is taking away the authority of parents to make decisions,” said Kate Anderson, a lawyer in the aforementioned cases, during the call.
Parents Joe and Serena Wailes are suing Jefferson County Public Schools after their 11-year-old daughter was allegedly forced to sleep in a bed with a biological boy during a Governor’s Ranch Elementary School field trip to Washington, D.C.
‘They’re transferring decisions that should be in the hands of the parents to the parents themselves, and then hiding that information from them, so they don’t know that the school is making decisions behind their backs, and that’s dangerous.’
“Every one of these clients tells us they are experiencing really dangerous policies that harm children in their districts,” he continued.
Serena Wailes, the mother who is suing Colorado’s Jefferson County Public Schools for putting a biological child in the same sleeping area as her 11-year-old daughter, stressed how she felt betrayed by her school district.
“We trust these people,” Serena Wailes told reporters on a call.
‘We were told throughout the process that the boys were going to be on one floor and the girls on another, and at no point during this process did they say that it was going to be based on gender identity, so we relied on that.’
“We trust our school district with our children, and they have failed us.”
The Littleton family is now demanding that the school (pictured) inform parents in advance of the gender of the people their children are expected to share a bed with.
She described her surprise at learning about her daughter’s situation.
“It was really shocking, because I was downstairs in the hallway with the other moms, and I got a call from our daughter, who was upstairs and was hiding in the bathroom.”
“Her voice shakes and she doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of the other kids in her room, but she says, ‘Mom, I don’t feel good about this.'”
“I invited her over and we talked about it, and then the escort came over and we talked about it, and then we found out it was true. And honestly, I have to say that I feel cheated.”
Then Michigan parents Dan and Jennifer Mead spoke.
They filed a lawsuit against the Rockford Public School District after discovering that the school had been referring to their son using “he/him” pronouns last year.
Jennifer described how they sought academic help for her daughter through her school counselor and began sharing intimate details about the student and her academic and personal life.
“And the whole time they were lying to us, changing records. They would call her by a male name, a male pronoun at school, and then when they would talk to us or send something home, it would always be her, you know, they would give them her first name.”
“It was shocking because we felt like we had been deceived too,” the mother said.
They claim the school secretly “socially transitioned” her before her parents realized.
Dan and Jennifer Mead are suing a Michigan public school district for using male pronouns for their eighth-grade daughter without her knowledge.
The lawsuit against the Rockford Public School District alleges that the school violated the parents’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Parents found out in October 2022 when a school psychologist inadvertently included the boy’s male name in a section of a report that was sent home.
The eighth-grader’s name had been changed to his birth name on the rest of the document, according to the lawsuit.
Finally, a teacher spoke out to address how she is taking action against the Harrisonburg City Public School Board in Virginia for allegedly muzzling her ability to talk to parents about their children’s gender identities.
She identified with the parents’ stories and said she is a victim of similar policies as an educator.
“This policy I work on misleads parents and harms children,” said Deb Figliola, a high school teacher. “It also forces me to lie.”
Deb Figliola, a teacher in Harrisonburg, Virginia, says she was asked to lie to parents about their own children.
The Virginian described the inner turmoil she felt when she was ordered to conceal these crucial events from the students’ parents.
“That policy was that we were always to acknowledge a student who came into the building and said they wanted to be identified by a different name and pronoun, and we were always to use that with them,” Figliola said. “And we were never to tell parents.”
“We are there to take a snapshot. We bring a lot of experience as teachers, but it is not enough to make those kinds of decisions that last a lifetime,” he said.
“Parents are the ones who are there when we are no longer there, and they are the ones who were there long before any teacher got involved,” she added.