22 States Back NJ Father’s Fight Against School For Keeping Daughter’s Sex Transition Secret

22 States Back NJ Father’s Fight Against School For Keeping Daughter’s Sex Transition Secret

A New Jersey father fighting for his parental rights has rallied the support of 22 states, propelling his case into the national spotlight.

The father, Christin Heaps, is suing his child’s school for “socially transitioning” her to the opposite sex without telling him.

The states say school districts have no interest—much less a constitutionally compelling one—in concealing minor students’ social sex transitions from their parents. Montana AG Austin Knudsen filed the amicus brief (embedded below) on behalf of the multi-state coalition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit earlier this month.

It is one of many “friend-of-the-court” briefs submitted by advocacy groups weighing in on what promises to be a closely watched battle in the country’s transgender culture wars.

Heaps’s daughter was almost halfway through her freshman year at the Delaware Valley Regional High School when her father heard another parent refer to her as a boy, the lawsuit says. He was shocked. Inquiring further, he discovered that for months, high school staff had been calling “Jane” by a masculine name and pronouns, “socially transitioning” her to the opposite sex — all without his knowledge, much less his consent.

In fact, according to the lawsuit, they deliberately hid it from Heaps, using his daughter’s given name and pronouns when speaking to him, and her preferred male name and pronouns when speaking to her in school.

Then they doubled down. According to the lawsuit, when Jane’s father told the school to stop “socially transitioning” her, the school’s staff refused, persisting in referring to her as a boy over his objections, even after he transferred her to the district’s online home-instruction program.

The school district says it was simply following school policy and similar statewide guidance. Under New Jersey’s Policy 5756 — as elsewhere across the country — all the student has to do is ask to be treated as the opposite sex, and the school must comply. No diagnosis is necessary to have his or her new gender identity automatically “recognized and respected.”

And while the school district says that doesn’t mean its staff may lie to parents, they have “no affirmative duty” to tell them when their child requests to change sex.

In other words, the policy allows school staff to mislead and deceive parents, so long as they don’t lie to their faces when asked point-blank if they’re “transing” their kids.

Advocates claim that secret social transitioning policies are reactive, not proactive. As the Delaware Valley school board’s attorney put it in this interview, trans-identified students are “coming to the school with an issue, and asking the school to resolve it for them.” (As if that were the school’s job.)

All too often, however, the distinction between “reactive” and “proactive” policy is blurred, especially when a school counselor is involved. School counselors, as I reported earlier, don’t just give career advice any more. They play a central role in what my friend @ALegalProcess calls the “identify-transition-and-conceal” regime in public schools.

In Heaps’s case, it was the school counselor who led Jane down the path toward social transitioning. According to the lawsuit, Jane attended an extracurricular club meeting where the school counselor ran a session about “gender identity.” During the meeting, Jane — a student traumatized by the loss of her mother at the age of four — told the counselor she identified as a transgender male.

In a later private discussion, according to the lawsuit, the school counselor offered Jane a new masculine name and pronouns, to which Jane agreed. The counselor immediately began referring to Jane as a boy. She never asked, nor seemed to care, about the host of diagnosed mental issues that plagued Jane since her mother’s death, including ADHD, autism, and anxiety, the lawsuit says.

Last year, Heaps sued the school in federal district court for shutting him out of that discussion, in violation of his parental rights.

In a ruling the father’s lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom say misunderstands and misapplies governing law, the court held Heaps was unlikely to succeed with his claims. It said the school was acting on Jane’s request and had not engaged in the type of “proactive, coercive interference with the parent-child relationship” that would violate the father’s rights.

His lawyers appealed to the Third Circuit, where his case is now pending.

In its amicus brief, the multi-state coalition asks the federal appeals court to reverse the lower court’s decision: “The policy the school district relied upon to keep Mr. Heaps in the dark was not a mere ‘passive recognition’ designed to ‘benefit all students by promoting acceptance,'” they say.  It was “a cover to keep his child in its clutches through fraudulent representations.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, allowing parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ instruction on religious grounds, supports the father’s case, the states argue.

In Mahmoud, the Court rejected the school board’s characterizations of the “LGBTQ+-inclusive” instruction as mere “exposure to objectionable ideas,” or as lessons in “mutual respect.”

The states urge the appellate court, in line with Mahmoud, to reject the school’s transgender policy.

“Transing” kids is much worse than reading them LGBTQ+- inclusive storybooks, they argue:

‘[S]ocial transitioning’ of a minor constitutes an even greater interference with parental rights than the curriculum in Mahmoud. Social transitioning is not a matter of mere ‘passive recognition.’ It is ‘an active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning.’

The [school] district presumably doesn’t treat a child’s depression or other mental health issues without involving parents, and it has no duty or right to keep parents in the dark about gender-related distress either.

That point has been repeated in virtually every parental notification case we’ve covered at Legal Insurrection: Social transitioning policies are not mere “civility codes.” They are proactive measures that facilitate a child’s decision to “become” the opposite sex, putting them on the path to permanent, life-altering medical transitioning.

“Hiding this information from parents,” the states argue, “removes their ability to intervene at a time where parental involvement is needed most.”

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