A legal group is speaking out after learning that a school facilitated an 11-year-old girl’s “gender transition” behind her family’s back, and only informed them when she had become suicidal.

The girl told her teachers at age 11 she wanted to be a boy but didn’t want her parents to know. She became suicidal after a year of living a double life as a boy at school and a girl at home.

Only when she told her guidance counsellor she was depressed and wanted to kill herself did the school inform her parents, says lawyer John Carpay, director of the Calgary-based Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF).

The parents knew their daughter, who is moderately autistic, was struggling, but had no idea the school was facilitating her “transition” to a “boy,” Carpay said.

Carpay believes this is proof — if any were needed — that the Alberta NDP government’s radical bill forbidding schools from telling parents if their child joins a gay-straight alliance without the child’s consent will harm vulnerable children. Full report