Massachusetts school secretly transitions an 11-year-old girl against her parents’ instructions
July 18, 2025 - Alliance Defending Freedom
LUDLOW, Mass. — “When Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri learned that their middle-school daughter was experiencing depression and questioning her gender identity, they hired a private counselor to help her. They informed the school district they were getting their daughter the mental health help she needed and instructed school officials to not have any private conversations with their daughter about these matters.
Attorneys explain in [a petition to the supreme court,] however, how school officials thought they knew better than the parents. They decided to ‘socially transition’ the girl against her parents’ stated wishes. Officials regularly met with her to assist with and encourage her ‘transition’ to ‘genderqueer,’ with a male name and nonbinary pronouns, and using bathrooms where middle school boys undressed.” - ADF
“Additionally, in regular online private chats with the daughter, the school counselor promoted her identification as “genderqueer” and her use of a male name and questioned her parents’ choice of a mental-health counselor, all without saying anything to her parents. Indeed, school officials actively concealed their activities by using the girl’s real name and pronouns when communicating with her parents but using her male name and nonbinary pronouns at school.
The school counselor instructed middle-school staff that they should not tell the parents about their daughter’s use of a male name without her permission, but one of the teachers eventually did. The school district promptly fired her.
After learning what the school district was doing to their daughter, Foote and Silvestri begged district officials for help. But their efforts were futile. The middle-school principal intimated that the school knew what was best for Foote and Silvestri’s children. The district superintendent approved of the staff’s actions as consistent with district policy. And when the parents again pleaded with middle-school staff to stop, they were ignored.
Later, at a public meeting, the superintendent deemed parental rights a “thinly veiled … camouflage” for “intolerance, prejudice and bigotry against LGBTQ individuals.” And the school-board chair demeaned parents’ concerns about secretly transitioning children as “prejudice and bigotry.” - ADF
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Photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash
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