When our daughter was a 14-year-old freshman at Bellaire High School in 2022, her theater teacher asked what pronouns should be used to refer to her. My husband and I met with the teacher and made our wishes clear: our daughter is female, and we expected her to be addressed accordingly.

We thought the matter was settled.

It wasn’t.

At the end of her sophomore year, we discovered something deeply troubling: multiple Houston Independent School District (HISD) employees—including her theater teacher—had been referring to our daughter as a boy during the school day. They were using a masculine name and male pronouns without our knowledge or consent.

We had not changed our position. We had not given permission. Yet, under HISD policy, school employees had apparently decided to treat our daughter differently from the way her parents had directed.

The evidence was difficult to comprehend. One teacher even crossed out the legal name our daughter had written on an assignment and replaced it with a different name in red ink.

This was not a conversation we had been invited into. It was a decision being made around us—and about our child.

We immediately began meeting with her teachers, counselor and principal. We explained our concerns and asked that the school follow our instructions. Instead, the principal refused to direct his employees to do so and asked whether we could reach a compromise.

But there was nothing to compromise.

For at least two years, more than half a dozen HISD employees had been referring to our daughter as a boy despite our express objections. And we had been left out of the process entirely.

For our family, this was not simply a disagreement over terminology. It touched the most fundamental question of all: Who has the primary responsibility for raising and guiding a child?

As Christians, we believe that God created the family and entrusted parents with the responsibility of raising, guiding and caring for their children. The school’s actions also conflicted with our sincerely held religious beliefs and, as we understood it, the guidance we had received from our daughter’s therapist.

So, with the guidance of Alliance Defending Freedom, we filed a federal lawsuit in June 2025 against HISD and Superintendent Mike Miles, Bellaire High School Principal Michael Niggli and counselor Sarah Ray.

Our lawsuit asserted that parents have a constitutional right to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children without improper government interference. We also alleged that HISD’s policy violated our First Amendment rights by burdening our sincerely held religious beliefs.

We never wanted a lawsuit.

We wanted our daughter’s school to listen to her parents.

In November 2025, we settled the lawsuit after HISD agreed to direct all Bellaire employees to address our daughter by her given name and female pronouns while she remained enrolled in the district.

To me, that seemed like such a simple request.

Yet it took years, countless difficult conversations and ultimately a federal lawsuit to accomplish it.

The legal battle may have ended, but the impact on our family did not disappear overnight. What should have been ordinary years of adolescence became years marked by stress, conflict and uncertainty. We watched our daughter become vulnerable to messages about identity coming from school and social media—messages that we believed were inconsistent with our values and with what we believed was best for her.

And that is what concerns me most.

Our children are growing up in a world where institutions, social media and their peers can have enormous influence over how they see themselves. Parents cannot assume that what happens during the school day stays within the boundaries of the classroom. We have to remain engaged. We have to ask questions. We have to know what our children are being taught, what they are being told and who is speaking into their lives.

Because parents are not obstacles to their children’s well-being. Parents are their children’s first protectors.

No one knows our children better than we do. No one has loved, sacrificed for and prayed over them from the moment they entered this world the way their parents have.

Our experience taught us something I hope other parents never have to learn the hard way:

You cannot protect what you are not paying attention to.

Parents should not have to file a federal lawsuit to be heard by their child’s school. They should not have to discover after the fact that decisions about their child’s identity were being made without them.

Our family chose to speak up because we believed our daughter was worth fighting for.

And she is.

But this is bigger than our family.

Every parent deserves to know what is happening to their child at school. Every child deserves the protection, love and guidance of the adults entrusted with their care.

We cannot outsource the raising of our children and then be surprised when someone else begins making decisions we never gave them permission to make.

Our children need us to stay engaged. They need us to ask hard questions. They need us to speak when something is wrong—and to stand in the gap when they cannot stand there for themselves.

Because protecting our children is not someone else’s job. It is ours.