The Kettle Moraine School District allows students to alter names and pronouns without parental consent.
Two sets of parents have filed a lawsuit against the Kettle Moraine School District outside Waukesha, Wis., challenging the district’s policy that allows students to alter their names and pronouns without parental consent.
One of the couples withdrew their 12-year-old daughter from school after the school routinely addressed her using a male name and male pronouns, without parental consent and despite her parents’ objections. The second couple joined the lawsuit out of general opposition to the policy.
“The parents in this case know and love their daughter and are doing their best to get her the expert care she needs in her battle with anxiety and depression,” said a statement from Kate Anderson, senior counsel and director of the Center for Parental Rights at Alliance Defending Freedom, which, along with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, is representing the parents in this case.
“We are asking the court to respect the serious concerns of these parents by ensuring Kettle Moraine School District swiftly changes its policy that is undermining parents and harming children,” Anderson added.
Prior to filing the lawsuit, Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty wrote to the school district on behalf of their clients, asking that the district alter its policy to require parental consent before referring to a student by preferred name or pronouns. According to ADF, the district did not respond, which prompted the suit.
The Kettle Moraine School District’s policy mirrors similar policies across the country adopted in recent years, in which teachers and administrators accede to a student’s request to alter name or pronouns without notifying the student’s parents, in some cases actively concealing the situation from the parents.
As journalist Abigail Shrier documented in her recent book Irreversible Damage, policies such as these tend to be motivated by proponents of gender ideology who work within the education bureaucracy and who assume that parents will not be sufficiently “supportive” of a transgender child and thus must be excluded from the situation entirely.
In some of her interviews, Shrier found that these administrators believe anything other than total acceptance of a child’s self-identification is dangerous and harmful to the child, a conclusion that leads them to alienate parents, treat them as a threat, and, as in this particular Wisconsin districts, place the school’s judgment above that of a parent.