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The appellate court claimed that parental rights are “not unlimited” and don’t apply in this case because socially transitioning a child at school isn’t “a medical intervention” — woefully ignoring the growing evidence that shows otherwise.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has ruled against parents who filed suit against a Massachusetts school district after the district socially transitioned their 11-year-old daughter against their expressed desire.
The court stated that parental rights “are not unlimited,” writing, “We acknowledge the fundamental importance of the rights asserted by the Parents to be informed of, and to direct, significant aspects of their child’s life — including their socialization, education, and health. Parents may not invoke the Due Process Clause [of the 14th Amendment] to create a preferred educational experience for their child in public school.”
The case began early in the 2020-2021 school year when librarian Jordan Funke told students to create video biographies about themselves that included their pronouns.
Following the project Marissa Silvestri and Stephen Foote’s daughter began receiving “unsolicited LGBTQ-themed video suggestions” on her school Google account.
After she watched the videos, she began questioning whether she was attracted to girls and whether she was transgender.
In December 2020, the student sought out a teacher and told her she was depressed, feeling insecure, had issues with her self-esteem, felt unpopular, and was wondering if she was attracted to the same sex.
The teacher told her parents about the conversation, and Silvestri conveyed her gratitude saying the parents would seek professional help for their daughter.
After this Silvestri sent an email to Baird’s principal Stacy Monette, then-Superintendent Todd Gazda, members of the Ludlow School Committee, and the student’s teachers that told them of their plans to get their daughter professional help. She also wrote, “we request that you do not have any private conversations with [the Student] in regards to this matter. Please allow us to address this as a family and with the proper professionals.”
On February 28, 2021, the daughter sent an email to her teachers, the superintendent, and school counselor Marie-Claire Foley stating that she was “genderqueer” and wanted to use a new name and “any pronouns” other than it/its.
The student met with Foley and said she was still figuring out how to tell her parents. Foley instructed all school staff to use her chosen name at school and her birth name in all communications with her parents.
Following this, Funke, the librarian, spoke to her one-on-one about gender identity and provided her with “LGBTQ-related resources.”
Foley also told her she could use whatever bathroom or locker room she wanted.
Shortly after, the teacher who had initially talked to Silvestri about her daughter’s problems informed the parents that their daughter was using a different name and pronouns at school.
They met with Gazda and expressed their displeasure that the school had gone against their wishes, but Gazda said the staff obeyed Massachusetts law.
The school staff continued to facilitate the student’s gender transition.
During April and May 2021, Foley communicated with the student about her gender identity via text messages and online chat and urged the student to meet with her weekly to talk about her identity.
In one message, Foley inquired if her parents “were providing [her] with appropriate care” and asked if the student was comfortable talking about these issues with her parents and the counselor they had chosen.
Gazda also expressed his support for the policy at a school committee meeting in May 2021 where he stated, the district would “continue to help . . . children ‘express who they are’ despite parents’ wishes to the contrary.”
The parents then filed a lawsuit, arguing that a social transition is a mental health treatment and thus usurped their right to make medical decisions for their daughter.
A district court dismissed their case, but the First Circuit decided to take it up on appeal.
The appellate panel disagreed with the charge from the parents that school staff using their daughter’s preferred pronouns and a new name and allowing her to use the bathroom and locker room of her choice constituted medical treatment.
“Although the Parents described the decisions made by Ludlow educators as ‘mental health treatment,’ their labeling, without more, cannot transform the alleged conduct into a medical intervention,” the court wrote.
“The Parents allege, for example, that Ludlow educators spoke in private with their child to promote exploring and experimenting with alternative or discordant gender identities and facilitate their child’s gender affirming social transitioning, which, the Parents say, constitutes mental health treatment,” they continued. “[W]e are unconvinced that merely alleging Ludlow’s use of gender-affirming pronouns or a gender affirming name suffices to state a claim that the school provided medical treatment to the Student.”
For more than a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld parents’ rights to direct their child’s overall well-being, including all issues related to physical and mental health, but the First Circuit rejected that long precedent as being too vague to apply to this case. The judges wrote, “In fact, while the Supreme Court has ‘never specifically defined the scope of a parent’s right to direct her child’s medical care’ the Parents fail to state a claim because their allegations as stated do not suffice to describe medical treatment at all,” they ruled.
As for the parents’ accusation that the curriculum and actions of administrative staff violated their parental rights, the court reasoned that “once parents choose to send their children to public school, ‘they do not have a constitutional right to ‘direct how a public school teaches their child.”
The court ruled that concerns from parents regarding conversations with school counselors and polices around bathroom access were no different than questions about curriculum and that they do not violate parental rights, writing that “the Parents are challenging how Baird Middle School chooses to maintain what it considers a desirable and fruitful pedagogical environment.”
The court also likened a mental health counselor giving a child books and websites on the LGBTQ lifestyle to a guidance counselor giving a student information on career choices, writing: “…providing educational resources about LGBTQ-related issues to a child who has shown interest imposes no more compulsion to identify as genderqueer than providing a book about brick laying could coerce a student into becoming a mason.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley replied to the court’s reasoning on X, writing,
“The 1st Circuit just held that parents have no right to know about their 11-year-old changing gender in school…This ‘unwritten policy’ was viewed as overriding parental rights. The decision is defended as a reflection of our ‘pluralistic society’…There is no more cherished right that citizens possess than raising their children. Indeed, the right to raise one’s children according to your own faith and values is the touchstone of freedom. Conversely, the subordination of such rights is the harbinger of state tyranny.”
He added,
“True pluralism allows families with different norms and values to thrive. Public schools are effectively demanding that parents give up their rights to critical aspects of rearing their children as a condition for public education. It is a virtual slogan for school choice.”
In its ruling, the three-judge panel also stated, “To the extent the parents oppose certain academic assignments, the use of a student’s pronouns in the classroom, decisions about bathroom access, and a guidance counselor speaking to a student, none of those concerns restrict parental rights under the due-process clause.”
In other words, if your child attends a public school, the school can do whatever they want during school hours.
This opinion completely neuters the parental rights protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and numerous Supreme Court rulings going back to the early 20th century.
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of this ruling, however, was the court’s inexcusable lack of knowledge, or willful denial, of current evidence regarding gender transitions, particularly social transitions.
Nearly three years ago, Dr. Hillary Cass’s interim report was so damning for transgender treatments that England’s National Health Service (NHS) closed its Tavistock gender clinic and strongly cautioned against allowing social transitions.
The NHS found that gender incongruence usually does not “persist into adulthood” and said that social transitions should not be viewed as “neutral” but as “active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning.”
Since most children grow to be comfortable with their sex, “the provision of approaches for social transition should only be considered where the approach is necessary for the alleviation of, or prevention of, clinically significant distress or significant impairment in social functioning and the young person is able to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition.”
Fast forward to now and the evidence is much greater against gender transitions and social transitions. The final Cass Review was released in 2024, and it proved the death knell for the gender transition industry in the U.K. Following the report, the U.K. banned the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors.
Many gender proponents in the U.S. dismiss U.K. guidance because American medical associations still support gender transitions.
But those medical associations rely on the treatment guidelines formed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which has recently been discredited. The WPATH files exposed the organization for actively hiding side effects and ills caused by “gender affirming care.”
And yet, despite all this clear evidence, the First Circuit raved about Ludlow’s policy and falsely claimed that when treated as the opposite gender, transgender minors show the “same, healthy psychological profile as their peers.”
In fact, minors who transition without parental consent have higher suicide rates.
Meanwhile, the court’s claim that exposing children to LGBTQ materials and bricklaying are comparable is grossly naïve. As NHS and many others have come to accept, the meteoric increase in children, particularly girls, claiming to have gender dysphoria is largely a social contagion; in fact, until very recently gender dysphoria was a rare condition that only affected young boys, not girls.
As the Standing for Freedom Center reported recently, there was a 422 percent rise among adults under 25 identifying as transgender from 2014 to 2023. This exponential growth was the primary catalyst behind NHS’s review.
What’s more, biological sex and sexuality are core parts of identity. They are orders of magnitude more important, and potential issues with them more concerning (and thus demanding far more focus), than laying bricks.
In a world that now celebrates victimhood, being transgender also brings with it attention, a sense of belonging to community, and a promised answer to the fears, issues, and insecurities a young person faces. In other words, thanks to social media, the increasing influence of LGBTQ activists, and the rise of drag queen story hour and LGBTQ storylines in books and movies, transgenderism has become trendy and fashionable among young people who are confused and desperate to please, and get attention from, a new category of “cool” kids and influencers.
There is no such similar public and school-enforced campaign to develop bricklayers, and certainly no teacher would think there was any justification to hide a child’s interest in becoming a bricklayer from his or her parents.
Finally, social transitions are not harmless. They put children on the path to medical transition, and they place the transitioning student and other students in dangerous and possibly traumatic situations by encouraging them to use opposite-sex facilities and play sports with and against the opposite sex.
The First Circuit got this ruling painfully wrong, jeopardizing parental rights and child safety.
Hopefully the parents will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and the justices will agree to hear it. It is high time our High Court weighs in and provides clarity on this issue: Do Americans have diminished parental rights just because they send their children to a public school?
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