Maine Mom Sues School District That Secretly Gave 13-Year-Old Daughter a ‘Chest Binder’

A mom in Maine has filed a federal lawsuit against local school officials after she says they started referring to her 13-year-old daughter as a boy without her knowledge and provided the eighth-grader with chest binders so she would look more like a boy.

Amber Lavigne and lawyers with the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute filed the lawsuit against Great Salt Bay Community School leaders on Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

The lawsuit alleges that the Great Salt Bay transgender guidelines “are unconstitutional insofar as they provide for the concealment of, or do not mandate informing parents of, a decision to provide ‘gender-affirming’ care to a student.”

Goldwater Institute lawyers argue that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects the fundamental right of parents to control the care, education, and upbringing of their children. By keeping Lavigne in the dark about her daughter’s struggles with her gender identity, and by taking steps publicly to help her daughter socially transition, school officials violated Lavigne’s right to direct her daughter’s upbringing and to make critical health care and education decisions for the girl.

National Review first wrote about Lavigne’s case in February.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, over the last century, that parents have a fundamental right to control and direct the education, upbringing, and healthcare decisions of their children,” Adam Shelton, the lead Goldwater Institute attorney on the case, said in a prepared statement. “But parents cannot meaningfully exercise this right if public schools hide vital information about their children from them — which is exactly what the Great Salt Bay Community School did to Ms. Lavigne.”

Great Salt Bay school leaders did not respond to request for comment in February. Attempts by National Review to reach Superintendent Lynsey Johnston on Wednesday on the phone and via email were not successful. However, in a statement to parents in February, Great Salt Bay Community School Principal Kim Schaff defended school staff, saying they are required to follow state and federal civil rights laws regarding discrimination and privacy.

“A misunderstanding of these laws pertaining to gender identity and privileged communication between school social workers and minor clients has resulted in the school and staff members becoming targets for hate speech and on-going threats,” she wrote in the letter.

Lavigne joins a growing list of parents across the country taking legal action and calling out school leaders for keeping them in the dark about important health issues involving their children, including evidence of possible gender dysphoria. If schools are aware that children in their care are struggling with their mental health, it is critical that parents be aware, they say.

Some transgender activists, on the other hand, say parents aren’t entitled to know if their child wants to change their name, gender identification, and pronouns at school, arguing that knowledge must be earned by parents. Parents who don’t immediately affirm their child’s new gender identity are engaged in a form of abuse, they say.

Lavigne told National Review in February that her daughter started talking to a school social worker about a year ago, toward the end of seventh grade, about a variety of mental-health issues she was dealing with, including some gender-identity issues. Lavigne, a Democrat who runs a mental-health business in the nearby community of Damariscotta, talked with the social worker about the issues, and came away thinking they weren’t particularly serious.

Lavigne’s daughter continued working with the same social worker at the beginning of eighth grade. However, in October, unbeknownst to Lavigne, her daughter was reassigned to another social worker, Samuel Roy, or “Mr. Sam,” as her daughter called him.

Details of Roy’s counseling are still not clear. But Lavigne and her lawyers believe that he provided her daughter with at least two chest binders. And “he told her that he wasn’t going to tell her parents, and that she didn’t need to either,” Shelton said in February.

Lavigne discovered one of the chest binders in her daughter’s room in early December. The girl initially said she’d gotten it from a friend, but later acknowledged she’d received it at school.

Lavigne eventually learned that school personnel had been involved in socially transitioning her daughter, referring to her by a new name and by male pronouns. No one informed Lavigne.

“It truly is like the epitome of driving a wedge between a child and their parents,” she said.

Lavigne said Johnston and Shaff, the superintendent and principal, initially expressed concern. But instead of taking action, school leaders circled the wagons. No policies had been violated, they said. All students in the kindergarten through eighth-grade school have “a right to privacy regardless of age,” they said.

Lavigne pulled her daughter out of school on December 8, and began to homeschool her. Four days later, state family services agents informed her that “they had received an anonymous report that Plaintiff was emotionally abusive towards” her daughter, the lawsuit states.

An investigation completed in January “did not support a finding of neglect or abuse,” according to the lawsuit.

School-district and board leaders in Great Salt Bay have mostly been tight-lipped about Lavigne’s case. In a letter to community members over the winter, they claimed that “certain parties are spreading a grossly inaccurate and one-sided story,” but they said they can’t legally respond, for confidentiality reasons.

They also linked the allegedly “false narrative” to two recent bomb threats at the school.

In February, Goldwater Institute lawyers sent a demand letter to the chairman of the Great Salt Bay school board calling for an investigation into Roy’s actions, and calling for the board to update its policies to make it clear that parents must be notified of any decisions affecting the mental-health and physical well-being of their children.

The lawsuit filed this week calls for a declaratory judgement that Great Salt Bay Community School’s policy and practice about withholding information from parents about their child’s psychosexual development, including gender identity, violates parents’ Fourteenth Amendment due-process rights. It also calls for an injunction preventing school officials from calling Lavigne’s daughter by a different name or pronouns without Lavigne’s consent.

“I deserve to know what’s happening to my child,” Lavigne said in a prepared statement. “The secrecy needs to stop.”