MADISON, Wisconsin (LifeSiteNews) — Wisconsin parents are suing a Madison school district over a “gender support plan” that advises teachers to hide students’ struggles with gender dysphoria from parents, despite the catastrophic risks of doing so.
The Daily Caller reports that Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) instructs school staff to share information about a student’s “gender identity and pronouns” only “based on the student’s preferences or as outlined in their gender support plan,” because “[s]tudents have the right to speak freely about their identity, but school staff do not.”
In response, four parents are anonymously suing the district, arguing that a “preemptive lawsuit is the only way to prevent lifelong harm to minors and preserve parents’ constitutional rights, because parents cannot be expected to know either the future or what the District is hiding from them. No professional organization recommends that untrained school officials secretly facilitate gender transitions without involving parents and experts.”
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide, and may even exacerbate it by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment further warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature, as attested to by many individuals who “detransitioned” back to their true sex.
The risks are grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
MMDS is the same district where a “family friendly” drag show was recently postponed due to public outcry, and which is holding a week-long lesson “for students to understand the difference between gender, sexual orientation and sex assigned at birth,” promoting gender-fluid ideology with a “gender snowperson” diagram and concluding with a “rainbow day.”
By contrast, this month three Wisconsin school boards (Muskego-Norway, Waukesha, and Arrowhead) voted to require parental consent before school staff may affirm and indulge confused students’ preferred “gender identity.”