Iowa School District Sued for Providing Gender-Transition Plans to Students without Parental Consent

Advocacy group Parents Defending Education filed a lawsuit against an Iowa school district on Tuesday challenging its policy of letting students form “gender support plans” without parental knowledge or consent.

The lawsuit accuses the Linn-Mar Community School District of violating parents’ Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well as students’ First Amendment right to free speech with its “Transgender and Students Nonconforming to Gender Role Stereotypes” policy, which allows school officials to help students as young as seventh-graders craft a plan for gender transition without parental involvement and forces other students to acknowledge their classmates’ preferred gender identity.

The plans can instruct staff and students to refer to a student by a new name and pronouns and to allow a student to participate in physical education classes, sports and activities for their new gender identity, according to PDE.

The policy instructs staff not to “disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status to others including but not limited to other students, parents, and school staff.” It tells school staff to ask students what pronouns to use when talking to a student’s parents.

Written records about a student’s gender identity are to be kept in a “temporarily file” that only those who receive permission from the student may access, the policy says.

Finally, the policy threatens that students who fail to respect a student’s gender identity can be punished, including with suspension or expulsion.

The Linn-Mar School Board approved the policy on April 25, despite protest from “dozens of community members,” according to PDE. The board argued that the new policy only codified existing district practices.

The lawsuit argues that the policy allows “children to make fundamentally important decisions about their gender identity without any parental involvement and to then hide these decisions from parents.” 

“A child’s gender identity implicates the most fundamental issues concerning the child, including the child’s religion, medical care, mental health, sense of self, and more. Yet despite ‘extensive precedent’ that parents must be involved in decisions concerning these types of issues … school districts across the country are increasingly excluding parents from decisionmaking when gender identity is involved,” the lawsuit reads.