Court: Schools can keep gender dysphoria secret from parents
Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee that parents have no right to know if a school is steering their child toward gender dysphoria.
Parents: ‘Allow us to address this as a family’
In 2020, an 11-year-old girl in Baird Middle School in Ludlow, Massachusetts began struggling with gender confusion and other mental health issues. The school was encouraging gender dysphoria through practices like asking students to use their “pronouns” in class assignments and sending students “unsolicited LGBTQ-themed video suggestions.” When the young girl’s parents learned she was experiencing mental health difficulties, they immediately sought help from a professional and explicitly asked the school not to discuss gender dysphoria with their child.
“Please allow us to address this as a family and with the proper professionals,” they wrote to school staff and administrators.
School secretly undermines parents
Nevertheless, when the girl told staff she was “genderqueer,” school staff immediately began to affirm her dysphoria. They started addressing her by her newly adopted name, though when speaking to her parents they referred to her by her actual name. The school counselor began corresponding with the child through text messages and online chats about gender identity and whether her parents were providing “appropriate care.” The counselor also encouraged her to attend weekly meetings to discuss her “gender-related concerns.”
According to court documents, Baird Middle School has a policy that “allows students of any age ‘to determine whether their parents will be notified about decisions related to affirming [their own] discordant gender identity.’” The school’s guidance claims that "the person best situated to determine a student's gender identity is that student.” Superintendent Todd Gazda boasted that, under his leadership, Ludlow Public Schools would "continue to help . . . children 'express who they are' despite parents' wishes to the contrary.
District court sides against parents
The parents sued the school for violating their Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. The Supreme Court understands due process to include parents’ rights to direct their children’s education and upbringing, make decisions about their physical and mental health treatment, and protect their family privacy.
A district court sided with the school, saying that the parents failed to show how the school’s mental health counseling, in which they aggressively exacerbated the child’s gender dysphoria, constituted mental health treatment. The judge also concluded that the parents did not show how the school engaged in “the sort of ‘conscience-shocking’ conduct required by Supreme Court precedent to establish a substantive due process violation.”
Federal appeals court sides against parents
The parents appealed, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in favor of the school. The First Circuit agreed with the district court that the school was not providing mental health treatment. It also concluded that while parents have control over their children’s upbringing at home, they have no say in public school education, which is best left to the “expertise” of the government.
“Parents may not invoke the Due Process Clause to create a preferred educational experience for their child in public school,” the court said in its ruling. “As per our understanding of Supreme Court precedent, our pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children. And the Protocol of nondisclosure as to a student's at-school gender expression without the student's consent does not restrict parental rights in a way courts have recognized as a violation of the guarantees of substantive due process.”
What does the data say?
Gender activists justify circumventing parents by claiming that kids with gender dysphoria will suffer mental health issues like suicidality if their “identity” is not immediately affirmed. This claim has been repeatedly debunked: not only do nearly all children outgrow their gender dysphoria, but evidence shows that dysphoric minors are not more prone to suicide than others who struggle with mental health issues.
Yet the appellate court based its decision precisely on that false premise. It cited an amicus curiae brief from The Trevor Project, a gender activist group funded by multinational corporations and government initiatives. The brief said that “transgender students have better mental health outcomes when their gender identity is affirmed.” But this claim is based on The Trevor Project’s own biased survey of transgender-identifying individuals who already favor so-called gender-affirming treatment. Even in its own report, The Trevor Project admits that “there was no significant difference in the suicide attempt rate among transgender and nonbinary young people who had access to gender-affirming online spaces and community events compared to those who did not.”
The First Circuit Court of Appeals is the first federal appellate court to rule on parental rights in the context of gender ideology.
