A public school in Michigan was slammed after it was accused of hiding the transgender status of a student from the parents.
The school also reportedly permitted the student to go by a different pronoun and named and instructed teachers not to inform the student’s parents about the transition.
In the email that was obtained by the media in the United States, the school’s counselor reportedly warned teachers at Richards Middle School in Fraser, Michigan about hiding the status of the student from the parents prior to the school’s parent teacher conferences.
The email reportedly instructed the teachers to “only use the student’s birth name and refer to the pronoun ‘he’ when talking to the student’s mother,” as they were not aware of the student’s recent transition.
According to the reports, the student was revealed to be a biological male.
Michigan middle school hides student's transgender status from parents https://t.co/LtRw75n81e
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 10, 2022
Following the controversy, a Fraser Public Schools spokesperson released a statement and did not deny that the district was hiding the gender status from the student’s parents and stated that “the district is mindful of and compliant with its obligations under Title IX laws.”
In 2016, former President Barack Obama’s DOE issued a guidance that will protect students from
any types of discrimination on the basis of gender identity, requiring the schools to treat students in a way consistent with their chosen gender.
However, former President Donald Trump rescinded the guidance, arguing that the Title IX protections only apply to biological sex and not gender identity.
But in 2021, President Biden changed the guidance, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County to extend Title IX protections to gender identity.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County reportedly ruled in a 6-3 decision that the “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status.”
“An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.
