If this astounding tale is true, then public schools are even more dangerous than I thought they were. If it is false, some conservative provocateurs are getting awfully creative, not to mention bold. In either case, wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. had journalists it could trust to relay the news in an honest and objective fashion?

The Washington Times, New York Post, Fox News, and other conservative news outlets all are reporting that a lawsuit has been filed by Jessica Konen, a California mother, claiming that two teachers and a principal in the Spreckels Union School District manipulated her middle-school daughter into believing she was transgender beginning when she was in the sixth grade.

Starting in 2019, Konen says, teachers recruited her daughter, then 11, into a club for gender anxious students. They “planted” the idea that the student, identified in the lawsuit as “A.G.” was transgender and bisexual, even though she did not understand then what those terms meant. They encouraged her ”to assume a new [male] name and use it at school, but warned her not to tell her mother because she “might not be supportive and that she couldn’t trust her,” Konen’s claim states.

In seventh grade, the involved school staff members helped A.G. fill out a Gender Support Plan, which included access to a unisex bathroom. School employees were told to call the student by her new male name and pronouns, but in front of her mother, they used the student’s female pronouns and birth name.

The school ultimately called in Konen to inform her about A.G.’s new male identity. The mother was pressured to sign a document that allowed her child to go by an “a.k.a.” name on the attendance roster; then she learned, the school later changed the student’s name on official school records.

When the district moved to Zooming in 2020 as the universal over-reaction to the Wuhan virus took hold, Konen says her daughter “began to return to her old self” absent constant indoctrination by school staff. A.G. transferred to a different district last year and now goes by her original name and female pronouns.

Still the girl is “confused about issues relating to her sexuality and gender, and she believes that Respondents caused this confusion.”

“They invited kids, including Jessica’s daughter, to be in this [transgender] club, and they told these kids, do not tell your parents, and specifically Jessica’s mom, do not tell them, they cannot be trusted,” the Center for American Liberty’s CEO told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. The Center is representing Konen. “They gave them reading materials about transgenderism,” Harmeet K. Dhillon told Ingraham, who is helping to raise money for the lawsuit. “They secretly changed the pronouns, but when in front of the parents, referred to their children by their birth pronouns. Behind the parents’ back, in the school, [they] used their new identity. All this was done secretly.”

Oh come on. This sounds like a drug-induced transphobic’s nightmare. And yet…something strange was definitely going on at Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas. The Spreckels Union School District was the target of reports that teachers led an October 2021 workshop at a California Teachers Association conference on how to recruit students into the Equality Club, also known as UBU as in “you be you.” The district placed the teachers, who reportedly had said that they “totally stalked” student candidates for UBU membership, on administrative leave in November pending an independent investigation. It also suspended the lunchtime club, though it has been reinstated.

The school distirct refuses to answer inquiries, saying that the matter will be handled “though legal channels.” All we have is the mother’s representations so far.

Yet isn’t there enough smoke there, with the suspensions, the club, and the mother’s lawsuit, to dictate reporting by the mainstream media? The New York Times has ignored the story (I see the Seattle Times has reported it); doesn’t it qualify as a “version of the truth” that parents who read the Times should know about? Or does the “smoke” go too far in supporting the complaints of all those terrorist parents who want some control over what is placed in their children’s minds?