The October Term is about to begin at the U.S. Supreme Court, and another secret social transitioning case is waiting on its doorstep. Over a dozen civil-rights advocates have urged the Justices to grant review—and finally stop schools from “transing” children behind their parents’ backs.
The case is Foote v. Ludlow, the first of many secret social-transitioning lawsuits we’ve covered from the beginning at Legal Insurrection:
Earlier this year, a federal appeals court decided parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri had no right to be told when their 11-year old daughter “socially transitioned” to another sex in school. The school’s non-disclosure policy, the First Circuit court held, was necessary to promote a “safe and inclusive” environment for all of its students.
The parents brought their original lawsuit against the Ludlow, Massachusetts, school committee in 2022 after they learned from one of its teachers that their child had secretly become “genderqueer.”
If not for that one brave teacher—later fired for coming forward—according to the court filings, the parents might never have known: Under the school’s policy, when a student asks to be called by a new name and pronouns of a different sex, staff members must keep it a secret from the parents, unless they have the student’s consent.
Over the summer, the parents petitioned the Court to review the appellate court’s decision denying their right to be informed when their child “transitions” sex at school.
This is not the first time the Court has been asked to wade into the conflict over secret social transitioning in schools. Last year, in a 6-3 decision, it declined a parents’ petition to review a similar case involving a Wisconsin school’s gender identity plan. Justice Alito dissented, noting that the case presented a question “of great and growing national importance.”
Sixteen “friends of the court” have now filed amicus briefs in support of the parents. Together, they argue that this time, the Court should act.
From Defending Ed:
If the right to direct their child’s upbringing means anything, it means that parents get to decide whether their child takes the medically consequential step of socially transitioning to a different gender. At the very least, it means that parents deserve to know when their child’s school has made that decision for them. This Court should say so, and it should say so now.
The Court’s intervention will protect parents and children not only in Ludlow, but in schools across the country where similar transgender protocols have become de rigueur.
According to Defending Ed, a growing number of school districts, now numbering in the thousands and covering millions of students, have such policies. “That more and more schools are secretly transitioning students is especially troubling given the simultaneous rise in the number of American children who experience gender dysphoria,” they argue.
The Independent Women’s Law Center takes a similar stance in its amicus brief. They also point out that “the exponential increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in recent years is driven largely by young women and girls, who often have other mental health issues.”
Overall, “social transition is a controversial and unproven experiment masquerading as medical and mental health treatment that leads children and adolescents to persist in their gender dysphoria and prevents the proper treatment of underlying mental health issues.”
And how those mental health issues are treated is a decision for parents, not school staff, the IWLC argues.
But how can parents make those decisions—and exercise their constitutional rights—if the school deliberately keeps information about their children from them?
Concealing critical information about students strips parents of their fundamental rights, the Goldwater Institute argues in its brief.
That is the problem that vexed the parents in the Maryland lawsuit we covered last year here. Their schools’ guidelines mirrored Ludlow’s policy, allowing staff to socially transition students to the opposite sex without telling their parents. The Maryland parents lost their case because they failed to allege the injury necessary to show they had standing to bring it.
Of course they did, because the school was keeping them in the dark. How could they ever allege the injury necessary to show standing if they had to wait to know what they can’t ever know because the school is hiding it from them? Under school policy, by the time one of their children experiences gender dysphoria, the school may already have begun transitioning them. And by then the damage is done—all without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
“When the government withholds information in such a way as to render a constitutional right ineffectual, it violates that right,” the Goldwater brief concludes.
The Ludlow non-disclosure policy also violates the presumption that parents act in their children’s best interests, the Pennsylvania School Bd. Directors argue, by treating parents as “wrongdoers” without any evidence of abuse. “Established legal processes, such as mandatory reporting laws, exist to address genuine concerns of abuse, and schools must not bypass these safeguards to conceal information from parents,” they say in their brief.
“Since schools cannot make decisions rooted in parental power without parental consent, courts must evaluate whether a particular decision is rooted in parental or state power,” a coalition of states led by Montana argues. The First Circuit’s conclusion that the school’s decision to socially transition the parents’ daughter was well grounded in state power was “fundamentally wrong and at odds with centuries of history and tradition. ”
That’s not the only thing the appeals court got wrong. Readers may recall how, according to the First Circuit, the protocols the parents objected to were “curricular and administrative” decisions over which they had no say.
But school staff are not “educating” students by facilitating their delusions they belong to the opposite sex. And even if they were, the IWLC argues, just last term the Court in Mahmoud v. Taylor held that parents have a right to opt their kids out of gender and sexuality instruction—rejecting “th[e] chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.”
According to the First Circuit, using “gender-affirming” pronouns or a “gender-affirming” name isn’t a medical or mental-health treatment requiring parental consent: “Using the [s]tudent’s chosen name and pronouns,” the court wrote, is “something people routinely do with one another, and which requires no special training, skill, medication, or technology.”
The Manhattan Institute filing highlights decades of medical research to once again prove the court wrong: Social transitioning is a powerful mental-health intervention that “falls squarely within parents’ basic right to guide their children’s healthcare”—a right the Ludlow school prevents parents from exercising by “transing” kids behind their backs.
That research also shows that most kids with gender dysphoria eventually grow out of it and come to terms with their biological sex. However, “minors who are socially transitioned,” the Manhattan Institute continues, “are more likely to persist in their cross-gender feelings and, in time, seek medical interventions in the form of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. These interventions carry known and anticipated risks, including lifelong sterility, sexual dysfunction, mood disorders, and increased risk for cancer and heart disease.”
In other words, when schools like Ludlow “socially transition” students to the opposite sex, they put them on a path to permanent, life-altering medical transitioning—potentially “locking in” what would otherwise be a passing phase in a child’s development.
The consequences were tragic in the case of the Minneapolis school shooter, who admitted he was “tired of being trans” and wished “he never brainswashed himself”:
Whether there is a national transgender violence crisis is an ongoing debate.
What is clear, however, is that schools like Ludlow are feeding emotionally vulnerable children into the national transgender pipeline, facilitating a decision they will likely come to regret—all without their parents’ knowledge, much less consent.
The Court’s decision on granting cert. in Foote v. Ludlow is expected in the coming weeks.
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