Court reconsiders First Amendment challenge to Michigan school’s transgender policies

A federal court granted a request from two parents to consider whether a Michigan school district violated the First Amendment when officials began treating their daughter as a boy without informing them.

Judge Paul Maloney granted the motion to reconsider Aug. 7 in light of the 2026 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta . The Supreme Court decided 6-3 that a similar policy in California likely violated the parents’ First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion, which includes the right to direct the religious development of their children.

Similar to the California lawsuit, the two Michigan parents — Dan and Jennifer Mead — have argued that their views on gender and human sexuality are based on their Christian faith. The original lawsuit states that the Meads believe “each of us is born with a fixed biological sex that is a gift from God, not an arbitrary imposition subject to change.”

According to the lawsuit, their seventh-grade daughter asked school officials at the Rockford Public School District to refer to her with a masculine name and use male pronouns. School officials began doing this but never informed her parents, and the school counselor had…