And so it begins. Coming to a private Christian school near you.
An eight-year-old boy is suing his private school for “discrimination” after the institution refused to use female pronouns or allow the third-grader to wear a girl’s uniform to class. A lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court.
In 2016, Nikki Shah-Brar told his parents he identified as a girl: “I’m a girl. I want to be called a girl,” he reportedly told them. Priya Shah and Jaspret Brar capitulated to their child’s gender confusion and informed Heritage Oak Private Education that their son would enter third grade as a girl. After the private school allegedly provided “roadblocks” to Nikki’s transition, the family decided to sue.
Administrators told Brar and Shah that they would treat the little boy as a boy, says the suit.
“They said that we could grow her hair out,” Brar told BuzzFeed News. “But they said no girls bathroom, no female pronouns, no girls name, and no girls uniform.”
The school, in a statement to BuzzFeed, said they tried to work with the parents, offering a private bathroom for Nikki, for instance.
The suit claims that Heritage Oak Private Education “illegally discriminated against the girl on the basis of gender identity in a business, engaged in fraudulent business practices, and intentionally inflicted emotional harm,” notes BuzzFeed.
“Heritage Oak and Nobel Learning Communities exhibited reckless disregard for the emotional distress it would cause her, and engaged in the intentional infliction of emotional distress in violation of California common law,” says the suit.
The girl’s mother said that her son is on board with the lawsuit against Heritage Oak Private Education, which he stopped attending in February.
“We would not have done it if she didn’t support it,” she said. “This was a family decision. We thought we had to stand up for our child who was standing up for who she was. This is not something we do lightly.”
But lawyers for Nikki have made it clear that this lawsuit is politically-driven:
“Given that Trump and the Justice Department have turned their back on the discrimination of transgender individuals, it’s important to put the word out there that this sort of discrimination is actionable in every state in the nation,” said Public Council lawyer Mark Rosenbaum.
“The crux of the suit rests on California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which bars businesses from discriminating based on a person’s gender identity. The complaint also claims the school violated portions of the California Business and Professions Code, which bans fraudulent practices and misleading advertisements — the complaint alleges the school falsely claims to offer a program that educates the ‘whole child’ and give students ‘a sense of self-worth,'” explains BuzzFeed.