Two Secret Gender-Transitioning Cases Await Supreme Court Review

Two Secret Gender-Transitioning Cases Await Supreme Court Review

After months on the docket and multiple relistings, two high-profile gender-secrecy cases are scheduled for the Supreme Court’s conference tomorrow. During the private meeting, the Justices will vote on whether to grant the parents’ petitions for review in Foote v. Ludlow and Lavigne v. Great Salt Bay Community School.

Both cases present what Justice Alito has called “a question of great and growing national importance”: Whether a public school violates a parents’ fundamental constitutional rights when it secretly helps “transition” their child to a new gender.

Under gender policies in over 1,200 districts across the country, once a student tells school staff they want to “become” the opposite sex, the school will assign the student a new name and pronouns, even locker and restroom facilities—all without the parents’ knowledge, much less consent.

Foote v. Ludlow

Foote is the first of many secret social-transitioning lawsuits we’ve covered from the beginning at Legal Insurrection:

• Parents Petition US Supreme Court to Protect Rights in School Gender Transition Case
• Appeals Court: Parents Have No Right To Be Told When Their Child ‘Socially Transitions’ Sex In School
• First Circuit Court of Appeals Hears Oral Argument in School Secret Social Transitioning Case
• Federal Courts Allowing Secret Social Transitioning in Schools, Rebuff Parents’ Rights

Last 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—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.

Lavigne v. Great Salt Bay Community School

Like Foote, Lavigne comes to the Court following a parent’s loss in the First Circuit, only under even more outrageous circumstances, if that’s possible.

Maine mother Amber Lavigne had no idea her 13-year-old daughter was being socially transitioned in school—until she found a chest binder in her room. (A chest binder is a tight-fitting undergarment worn to flatten a female’s chest to make her appear male.) Her daughter said the Great Salt Bay school’s social worker gave it to her, told her how to use it, told her he wasn’t going to tell her mother about it, and told her she didn’t need to tell her mother about it either.

Lavigne also allegedly learned that school staff had been referring to her daughter with a new name and pronouns without telling her.

Last year, the First Circuit rejected Lavigne’s constitutional challenge to the school’s de facto policy of withholding information from parents, despite the existence of a written policy requiring parental notification. In December, she petitioned the Court to protect her parental rights and to resolve a split among the circuit courts over the procedural grounds for dismissing her case.

If the petitions in Foote and Lavigne are granted, the Court seems more likely than ever to side with the parents. It already did so earlier this month, when it concluded California’s gender-secrecy policies likely violate parental rights. Those policies, the Court wrote in Mirabelli v. Bonta, “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

We may learn whether the Court finally decides to take Foote and Lavigne on Monday at 9:30 a.m., when it releases its order list.

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