A California woman is threatening her local school district with a lawsuit for convincing her young daughter that she was transgender and bisexual.
Jessica Konen of Spreckels, California, filed a legal claim — the precursor to a lawsuit — against the Spreckels Union School District plus two teachers and the principal at Buena Vista Middle School. She claims the teachers, Lori Caldiera and Kelly Baraki, secretly manipulated her then-11-year-old daughter, referred to only as A.G., into changing her gender identity and requesting to be treated as a boy, even to the point of using a unisex restroom normally reserved for teachers.
That Caldiera and Baraki would do such a thing is hardly surprising. In a video from a California Teachers Association conference that was leaked to journalist Abigail Shrier in November, the two proudly laid out exactly how they recruited students to the LGBT cause and how they kept parents from finding out.
Caldiera and Baraki explained that when students were engaged in remote learning during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the teachers “totally stalked what [students] were doing on Google” and used that knowledge, plus their classroom observations, to identify potential recruits for their school’s pro-LGBT “Equality Club.” They further admitted that they intentionally kept no records of who attended club meetings, scheduled the meetings during lunch period rather than after school, and told students not to tell their parents about the club.
According to Konen’s legal claim, all this was enabled by the school’s Parental Secrecy Policy, under which the school would keep students’ gender confusion or gender-identity changes a secret from their parents.
Konen says that A.G. first attended an Equality Club meeting at the beginning of her sixth-grade year at the invitation of a friend, but only continued to go because of encouragement from Caldiera. Soon, Caldiera and Baraki were strongly hinting to A.G. that she was both transgender and bisexual, terms that the girl did not even fully understand at the time. Then they convinced her to begin using a boy’s name and wearing boys’ clothing. Worst of all, the teachers “instructed A.G. not to tell her mother about her new identity or new name, saying that her mother might not be supportive of her and that she couldn’t trust her mother,” reads the claim.
Later, Caldiera, by misrepresenting A.G.’s desires to other faculty and administrators, got everyone to call her by her new, male name and pronouns and obtained access to the unisex restroom for her, alleges Konen. Moreover, she claims, Caldiera insisted the girl read several articles on transgenderism, including one on how to hide it from parents — and, as usual, keep it a secret from her mom.
Meanwhile, the school kept Konen from learning of any of this. In all its communications with her, teachers and administrators continued to refer to A.G. by her given name and feminine pronouns.
Eventually, the principal called Konen in for a meeting, at which she was told what was going on with her daughter and was given no choice but to accept it. She says she feared having her daughter taken from her if she objected.
After more than a year of remote learning — and, therefore, far less influence from Caldiera and Baraki — A.G. “began to return to her old self,” says the claim. Nevertheless, she remains “confused about issues related to her sexuality” and still has a somewhat strained relationship with her mother.
Neither Konen nor her daughter really understood what had happened until Shrier reported on the leaked video. Then they began to realize that Caldiera and Baraki had orchestrated the entire sequence of events, with the girl the unwitting victim of their schemes — and probably not the only one.
As a result, they are asking the school district to “award appropriate damages … to the fullest extent allowed under the law.” Failure to do so will, of course, result in a lawsuit.
“Parents are supposed to have access to all the educational records of their children,” Konen’s attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, told the Associated Press. “The concept that the schools have a right to be running secret, don’t-tell-your-parents clubs and don’t-tell-your-parents programs and actively coaching children how to mutilate themselves … is certainly not consistent with California law.”
