There are two children in this story, and the lawsuit can only see one of them.
The one it sees is easy to love. A child whose parents are raising them, feeding them, praying over them, and who find out — late, or never — that the school has been calling their child a different name for months. That parent’s shock is real. Their right to know their own child is one of the oldest and most honest rights there is, older than any statute.
If that is the only child you can see, then the government’s lawsuit against Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools reads like simple justice: Parents have a right to their child’s records, the school hid them, the law says stop.
Eileen Monte
I want to be careful here, because that parent is not the villain. A mother lying awake, certain her child is carrying something she can’t name, deserves better than to be told it’s none of her business. Hold onto her. She is real.
But there is a second child.
This is the child the word “secret” was written to erase. The district’s actual practice — underneath that scary word — is a meeting. A student, or a parent, can ask to sit down with staff and talk about a name, a pronoun, a restroom. In the ordinary case, the parents are in the room. The exception — a student asking to keep a parent out — is not a policy of hiding. It is a judgment, made one child at a time, weighing that particular child’s age, grade and safety.
Weighing their safety. Sit with why a school would ever need to.
Because some children are not safe at home once their parents know. Not most. Some. There is a child, somewhere in that district or one like it, for whom the adult at that meeting has a specific, sickening reason to believe a phone call home does not lead to a conversation. It leads to a locked door, or a fist, or a bag packed and left on the porch.
“Some children are not safe at home once their parents know.”
For that child, the thing the lawsuit calls a secret is not a scheme against the family. It is the thin wall between them and harm, held up by the one grown-up who could see the danger coming.
The lawsuit does not mention this child. It cannot. To mention her is to admit that the rule it demands — tell the parents, always, in every case — protects the first child by exposing the second. That there is no single setting on the dial that saves them both.
The truth about me was mine to tell, and someone told it for me. That is the only expertise I bring to this. I know what it costs to have the door taken off a room you were not finished standing in.
So understand what this lawsuit actually asks a court to do. Not to protect children — that phrase assumes there is one kind. It asks the court to choose the first child over the second, and to call the choosing rescue.
And here is the part worth knowing before you decide it’s simple. This did not begin with either child. It did not begin with a Wyandotte County parent walking into a school in tears. It began with a complaint filed by an advocacy group in Washington — people whose work is producing exactly this kind of complaint — which traveled to a federal agency, became a threat to pull more than $70 million from the district, and then became a lawsuit. The document at the center of it, the “policy” everyone is fighting over, is one the district says its school board never actually adopted. The government’s own filing concedes the point, then argues the current practice is close enough.
Seventy million dollars. Held over a fire to force the outcome — money that teaches children, all the district’s children, the thousands who have nothing to do with any of this.
“It began with a complaint filed by an advocacy group in Washington — people whose work is producing exactly this kind of complaint.”
So now there are not two children in the story. There are thousands, and every one of them is being spent to win an argument that never really was theirs.
Scripture reserves its hardest words not for the ones who sin openly, but for those who lay heavy burdens on other people’s shoulders and will not lift them with a single finger of their own. That is the shape of this. The burden is laid on a child — the exposed one, the endangered one, the one whose district may lose the teacher she needed. And the ones who laid it are far away, and will carry none of it, and already have named the next district on the list.
I do not know the right answer for any particular child. That is the whole point. It is a particular judgment, made by someone who can see the particular danger — not a rule handed down from a thousand miles away on behalf of a grief that was manufactured to be handed down.
The child you cannot see is still standing at that door as I write this. Nobody in Washington is thinking about her.
Eileen Monte is a transgender woman writing from Fort Worth, Texas. She seeks to take on the political machine working to legislate trans people out of public life and the inherited fear it runs on. She is not a historian or a member of the clergy. Just a person of deep thoughts, stubborn convictions, and five kids who keep her honest.