CV NEWS FEED // A California public school district awarded a $100,000 settlement to a single mother after she sued them for “socially transitioning” her 11-year-old daughter behind her back.
In her case, Jessica Konen was represented by the Center for American Liberty, a conservative legal group founded by former candidate for Republican National Committee chairwoman Harmeet Dhillon.
As FOX News reported Tuesday, Konen
said her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, was told by her school in the Spreckels Union School District in Monterey County that she may be upset because she didn’t know who she “truly was inside.” From there, the school allowed her to use the boy’s bathroom, used male pronouns to refer to her and was “socially transitioned” away from her biological gender.
Once Konen found out that her daughter was being identified as a male and socially transitioning without her knowledge, she sued the district. Her daughter has since decided to re-identify as a girl, and the California single mother vowed to keep fighting for parental rights after the settlement in which she was represented by the Center for American Liberty.
Konen spoke at a school board meeting in December 2022, where she told the board members: “You took my ability to parent my child, even before I had any knowledge. I didn’t even get to show support. You asked for support. I didn’t get a chance.”
In addition to the school district, two teachers and the principal of Alicia’s middle school were named in the lawsuit, per an appearance Konen and Dhillon made on the Ingraham Angle in June 2022.
As stated by the lawsuit, the teachers in question “instructed students that they should not tell their parents about their new gender identities” and “purposely failed to keep Equality Club rosters or records so that parents could not discover their children’s participation.”
In addition, the school held “Equality Club meetings during lunch – as opposed to after school – so that students, who were too young to drive, did not have to ask their parents to pick them up.”
In the interview, Dhillon added that multiple teachers have confessed on video to “trying to teach other California teachers how to secretly run these clubs away from the knowledge of the parents.”
“As you know, we’ve been battling this for quite a while now,” said Konen in a video with her daughter announcing the settlement.
“But we have great news!” added a smiling Alicia.
“We settled our case!” both mother and daughter triumphantly declared in unison.
“We are now receiving justice from the school that decided to try to ‘transition’ my daughter behind my back,” Konen continued. “This is so wrong, and this settlement right here proves [it] in the public eye.”
“Parents, please be bold,” encouraged the mother. “Stand up for your children and fight for them. Fight for your rights.”
Mark Trammell, the Executive Director and General Counsel of the Center for American Liberty and one of the attorneys who represented Konen, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) that “This settlement sends a deafening message to schools across the country—violate a parent’s right to parent and you’ll pay out the nose.”
In the last week, California has been a prime battleground for the nation’s ongoing fight over parental rights.
On Monday, California’s Democratic attorney general filed suit against the Chino Valley School District’s parental notification policy, arguing, as CatholicVote reported, “that the policy causes irreparable mental and physical harm to students who identify as LBGTQ.”
However, other school districts in the state are not deterred by the lawsuit and are still going forward with implementing similar pro-parent policies.
