Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Supreme Court Declines To Hear Parents’ Challenge To School Policy Secretly Encouraging Gender Transitions

Flickr/Tony Webster

The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up parents’ challenge to a school district policy that secretly encourages gender transitions.

Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas would have granted the petition, according to the order.

“This case presents a question of great and growing national importance: whether a public school district violates parents’ ‘fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of’ their children…when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process,” Alito wrote in a dissent joined by Thomas. “We are told that more than 1,000 districts have adopted such policies.”

An association of parents whose children attend school in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District sued over a district policy that helps facilitate gender identity transitions while concealing the child’s new identity from his or her parents, according to their petition.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held in March that the parents did not have standing to challenge the policy because they had not been directly impacted by it.

“School is now like Las Vegas: ‘What happens at school stays at school,'” parents told the justices in their petition, noting the policies have already “generated over two dozen lawsuits” with more likely coming down the road. “As any parent knows, parental authority includes the right (and the solemn responsibility) to say no to children’s often short-sighted desires when necessary to protect them from themselves.”

Alito expressed concern that some courts are using standing “as a way of avoiding some particularly contentious constitutional questions.”

“[T]he challenged policy and associated equity training specifically encourage school personnel to keep parents in the dark about the ‘identities’ of their children, especially if the school believes that the parents would not support what the school thinks is appropriate,” Alito wrote. “Thus, the parents’ fear that the school district might make decisions for their children without their knowledge and consent is not ‘speculative.’…They are merely taking the school district at its word.”

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.