Do Parents Have a Right to Know If Teachers Cocoon Their Sixth Grader in an Alternate Reality?

Perhaps not.

Ms. Baraki admitted that she and Ms. Caldeira … used their “observations of kids in the classroom” to determine which students to invite to the Equality Club. Ms. Baraki admitted that students often don’t want to attend on their own and “need sort of a little bit of an invitation.”

–Konen v. Spreckels (complaint, 2022)

Defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child.

–Littlejohn v. Leon County (11th Cir. 2025)

Therapists and doctors started advising parents to “socially transition” their young children around 2000. Back then they seemed to target kids who were gender-nonconforming and may have expressed cross-sex identity spontaneously. Over time the practice spread to kids who became “gender dysphoric” only after exposure to the idea at school or online. Now, according to lawsuits, teachers and counselors all over America are actively encouraging middle school kids to pretend to be a different “gender” – and school policy obscures the psychological escapade from parents.

The secrecy, change of “identity,” and hot-breathed solicitude from school officials appear to stress out some kids to the point of mental breakdown.

This post is about “secret school transition” and the parental rights movement that fights it. As I often do, I’ll try to answer the question: Why does the trans movement keep winning in court even though the facts are against it?

How to Help a Child Lead a Double Life

Asking people to use pronouns different from your sex is known as “social transition.” Gender lobbyists believe social transition is meaningful and, in fact, a type of treatment akin to using hormones.

GLAAD:

Transition is the process a person undertakes to bring their gender expression and/or their body into alignment with their gender identity. ... Transition can include:

Social transition – Telling family, friends, and co-workers, using a different name, using different pronouns, dressing differently, starting or stopping wearing make-up and jewelry, etc

Legal transition …

Medical transition …

These steps may also be referred to as gender affirming care.

The American Academy of Pediatrics calls this practice “social affirmation” and ranks it among medical interventions as a “component” of “gender affirmation.” Its website has argued that pronoun use is a life-or-death matter. The suicide hotline Trevor Project claims pronouns are “words with big impact.” According to the Minnesota Department of Health, “using a person’s correct pronouns saves lives.”

Social transition can also mean using bathrooms designated for the opposite sex or a special bathroom (e.g., nurse’s office); competing in sports against the opposite sex; and changing clothes in the opposite sex’s locker room.

WPATH SOC8, the clinical guidelines for “transgender” healthcare, helpfully explains that social transition “has no singular set of parameters or actions.” Whatever it is, it “should originate from the child and reflect the child’s wishes[.]”

Who’s Transing What Now?

Gender lobbyists use “transition” as a reflexive verb – you socially transition [yourself] by asking people to pretend you’re a different sex; those people then affirm what you’ve already done.

Parental rights advocates scoff at the idea of children transitioning themselves. For them, transing is transitive: a teacher socially transitions a student by referring to them with wrong-sex pronouns, which reinforces a ruse, just as a doctor medically transitions a patient by prescribing her anabolic steroids.

Gender lobbyists stonewall about adults’ role in kids’ pronoun choices, always returning to their talking point that kids call the shots. In a Colorado case I discuss below, the school district waves away allegations that its employees manipulated sixth graders and frames the issue:

The families clearly desire to control their children’s gender identity and expression in public school[.]

Parents think they’re in a tug-of-war with the school over an innocent child. The school says the parents are in a tug-of-war with the child over innocent teachers.

Secret or Undisclosed?

When schools call kids by preferred pronouns without parental notification, parent advocates call it “secret school transition.” I’ll abbreviate it to SST. In 2023 the Heritage Foundation estimated that over 1,000 American school districts had SST policies, affecting more than 10 million students.

Gender lobbyists use more passive language. The Tenth Circuit quoted a Colorado school’s guidance:

School personnel should not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender or non-binary status to others, including students, parents …

When contacting or communicating with a parent/guardian of a transgender or non-binary student, school staff should use the name and pronouns that the student’s parent/guardian use, unless the student requests otherwise.

The school district defended itself by noting it wouldn’t lie if parents used the magic words:

“The District’s Guidelines do not require student consent or prohibit school employees from sharing a student’s gender identity or expression upon parental request. Nor do the Guidelines advise employees to engage in any subterfuge.”

SST doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s based on the theory that kids need to be recognized as their chosen “gender” – but then don’t their parents need to be brought on board? It’s also predicated on a theory that parents can’t be trusted – but the school sends the student home to these supposed monsters every afternoon.

SST conscripts the peers of trans-identified children into (1) propping up a falsehood, (2) propping up the classmate’s mental health so they don’t kill themselves and (3) keeping a secret from the classmate’s parents and anyone who might squeal to them (their own parents).

SST generates paperwork. I examined the regime of Montgomery County, Maryland and came away frazzled.

Some data suggests social transition locks in a trans identity so that kids are more likely to medicalize. But in a recent review of evidence, the US Department of Health and Human Services found that the “benefits and harms of social transition remain unknown” because the studies on it are flawed.

The Girls Who Seek Affirmation

Parents have launched a barrage of lawsuits targeting SST over the last several years. Represented by right-leaning law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom, Child and Parental Rights Campaign, and Center for American Liberty, they argue that schools violated their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children.

The legal minds in this space include Vernadette Broyles, president and founder of CPRC, and Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education. Many of the links in this post go to Perry’s analyses – here’s a comprehensive report from her published June 2024.

The kids fit a pattern: at the time school officials transed them, they were middle school girls dealing with ordinary stressors. The intervention seemed to exacerbate their struggles. When the parents found out about their daughters’ secret identities, they were able to reel them back to solid ground but only at significant effort, stress, and expense. They seek damages for the money they spent (counseling, private school) and emotional distress.

The lawsuits I’ve read make no mention of “gender nonconformity” before SST. I can’t say whether this cohort is representative of SST victims or if movement lawyers decided to focus on them because judges are likely to find the “ordinary 12-year old girl” scenario more noxious than, say, the SST of a delinquent 16-year old gay boy.

In Lee v. Poudre, two sets of parents jointly sued a school district for how it treated their daughters, CL and HJ. (One of the plaintiffs, Erin Lee, has since become a prominent parents’ rights advocate.) The 10th Circuit summed up the parents’ incredible allegations (citations omitted):

In fall 2020, the Lees moved to Wellington, Colorado. Their twelve-year old daughter, C.L., enrolled at Wellington Middle-High School (WMS) as a sixth grader. C.L. struggled to make friends. Her homeroom teacher, Jenna Riep, took an interest in her, and had several one-on-one conversations with C.L. about C.L.’s gender identity. Among other things, Riep stressed to C.L. that C.L. could reject her feminine pronouns. Despite those conversations, C.L. never questioned her gender identity.

On May 4, 2021, Riep, who was also the school’s art teacher, invited C.L. to an after-school meeting, describing it as being for the “GSA Art Club.” C.L. didn’t know that GSA was shorthand for Gender and Sexualities Alliance, and she agreed to attend the meeting because she liked art. Soon after arriving, C.L. saw that the meeting wasn’t about art. Instead, for ninety minutes, Kimberly Chambers, a substitute teacher in the school district, lectured the assembled students about gender identity and sexual orientation. Among other things, Chambers told the students that if they were not completely comfortable in their bodies, they were likely transgender. Her message led several students to announce during the meeting that they were transgender. For those students, Chambers awarded themed prizes, including LGBTQ-pride flags.

Though C.L. had not questioned her gender identity or experienced symptoms of gender dysphoria before this, she came out at the meeting as transgender. She did so after Chambers advised the students that transgender youth are more likely to attempt and complete suicide than their cisgender peers. Before the meeting ended, Chambers warned the students that it might not be safe to tell their parents they are transgender or about the meeting. Instead, she said that she could be trusted and gave the students her personal cell-phone number and Discord information so they could talk with her at any time.

As C.L. was leaving the meeting, Riep pulled her aside and reemphasized that she shouldn’t feel pressured to tell her parents about the meeting. Even so … she told her parents that she was transgender. … Astonished at what they had heard, the Lees disenrolled C.L. from the district the next day and enrolled her in a private school. Over the next few months, C.L. experienced suicidal thoughts …

After the Lees disenrolled C.L. from attending school in the district, WMS staff internally discussed involving child-protective services to conduct a wellness check on C.L. When the Lees contacted Kelby Benedict, the WMS principal, to discuss what happened at the GSA meeting, he insisted on going to the Lee home so that, unbeknownst to the Lees, he could check on C.L.

This is what Riep and Chambers look like, according to the Daily Mail. But you knew that already.

The parents’ allegations about HJ, who was transed by the same adults at the same school, during the same year as CL:

After [attending] two [GSA] meetings in the spring semester of sixth grade, H.J. began suffering from suicidal ideation. Because H.J. had been told that transgender people were more likely to commit suicide, H.J. believed that her suicidal thoughts further affirmed that she must be transgender. That in turn increased the intensity of her suicidal thoughts. This cycle continued for about six months and harmed H.J.’s mental health. During this time, H.J.’s friendships with classmates deteriorated, and she became nervous about attending classes taught by Riep, who kept asking her to return to the GSA meetings. Things got so bad that H.J. asked her parents to homeschool her so she wouldn’t have to go to WMS. Soon after that, H.J. attempted suicide.

The school district moved to dismiss the lawsuit, winning at the district court and, in April, at the 10th Circuit. The Court found the school’s SST policies never kicked in – Riep and Chambers didn’t hide any pronouns from parents. The parents are expected to appeal, either to the full “en banc” 10th Circuit or the US Supreme Court.

The school district’s appellate brief repeatedly refers to the parents’ “beliefs,” insinuating that they’re religious nuts. In arguing that parents have no “control of public education” the district gratuitously cites a 2024 law review article titled “Anti-Transgender Constitutional Law.” It could be a warning to judges that professors stand ready to call them “anti-transgender” if they rule against SST.

Other federal SST lawsuits include:

• Foote v. Ludlow (Mass.) followed a similar trajectory as Lee in the 1st Circuit and is being appealed. The court ruled that SST simply didn’t violate parental rights.

• Littlejohn v. Leon County (Florida). The 11th Circuit recently ruled against the parents, en banc, incorrectly treating the SST as though it were perpetrated by rogue officials even though they were following policy. The plaintiffs are expected to seek Supreme Court review. One of them, January Littlejohn, has become a parents’ rights advocate who worked to pass a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in Florida.

• John and Jane Parents 1 v. Montgomery County (Maryland), was dismissed by the 4th Circuit. The Supreme Court declined to review in 2024.

• Vitsaxaki v. Skaneateles was recently dismissed by the Northern District of New York and is on appeal to the 2d Circuit.

• Regino v. Chico was dismissed by the Eastern District of California but recently revived by the 9th Circuit.

• Parents Protecting Our Children v. Eau Claire, in Wisconsin, was dismissed by the 7th Circuit because the parents didn’t claim injury (they wanted to challenge the policy before it hurt their kids). The Supreme Court declined review in 2024.

• Willey v. Sweetwater was dismissed by the District of Wyoming in April because school officials revealed the SST to the mother after she demanded info about pronouns specifically.

Parents have fared better in state court:

• In TF and BF v. Kettle Moraine, a Wisconsin court ruled that SST violated parents’ rights.

• In Konen v. Spreckels, the California school district settled with a mother for $100,000 – perhaps because the teachers in question had been caught on tape discussing their wily recruitment and SST methods at a conference. The mother was represented by Harmeet Dhillon, who is now the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice.

The Law

The US Constitution doesn’t explicitly protect parental rights, but the Supreme Court has found an implied “liberty interest” to raise your kids without government interference by reading between the lines of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. Known as “substantive due process” (SDP), it’s the same reasoning the Court used to strike down anti-sodomy, anti-gay marriage, and anti-abortion laws (before changing its mind in Dobbs).

If parents are “fit,” the doctrine goes, then they have the right to “direct the upbringing” and “control the education” of their children. Fitness is a low bar and parents are always presumed to meet it – it’s not an issue in the SST lawsuits.

So what does it mean to “direct the upbringing” of a child? There are really only three Supreme Court decisions on point.

Meyer (1923) struck down a Nebraska law that banned schools from teaching foreign languages to children. Pierce (1925) struck down an Oregon law that required parents to send their kids to public schools. Both statutes grew out of a xenophobic craze for assimilating immigrants’ kids.

The Court’s most recent parental rights ruling is Troxel (2000), which narrowed a Washington law that allowed anyone (typically grandparents) to secure visitation rights with a child if a court found it was in the child’s best interests. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor:

So long as a parent adequately cares for his or her children (i.e., is fit), there will normally be no reason for the state to inject itself into the private realm of the family to further question the ability of that parent to make the best decisions concerning the rearing of that parent's children.

In SST cases, parents argue that teachers and counselors injected themselves into family life by socially transitioning their kid. School districts say they did nothing more than provide education on gender, which is a real thing, and follow the child’s lead.

Religious rights rulings come up in discussions of SDP because they lay out what parents may object to in public schools. Lawyers also quote bits and pieces from fitness cases to emphasize the Constitution’s respect for parents.

FERPA

A federal statute known as FERPA grants parents the right to access their minor children’s school records. This means schools can’t flat-out refuse to provide records that reveal students’ preferred names and pronouns or lie to parents who specifically ask about them.

But parents can’t sue under FERPA. Only the federal government can take action against a school district that violates it. And once a parent realizes the violation, they don’t need the right anymore – they’ve figured out SST occurred.

If you’ve ever wondered why state laws and school district policies around SST are so convoluted (they don’t simply say: “hide the pronouns!”), it’s because they’re stepping around FERPA like a cat burglar.

Why Parents Keep Losing

The SST rulings take different paths in their logic and apply slightly different laws depending on their jurisdiction. The 10th Circuit’s decision is well-reasoned; the 1st and 11th Circuit’s are written in gender patois.

But there seem to be common challenges haunting all the parents’ cases. When judges make blunders (11th Circuit), cop-out arguments (4th Circuit), or foolish analogies (1st Circuit) to reach pro-SST outcomes, I think it’s because several basic questions are nagging them.

What is the fundamental right, exactly?

It’s actually hard to nail down the parental right being violated. Here are the options:

The right to choose/know what pronouns school officials use to refer to your child

• There’s caselaw from the religion context limiting what schools must share with parents (since sharing info can become an administrative burden).

• In Lee, the parents argued for mandated disclosure only “on the transgender issue.” The 10th Circuit complained: “the parents cite no authority for what ‘the transgender issue’ includes, and fail to argue why the right would apply only to that information.”

• So if the parents are aiming at pronoun shenanigans and nothing more, they must explain why SST is special compared to all the other ways that schools screw up kids.

• This framing doesn’t get at the fundamental problem of predation.

The right to protect kids from predation

It’s hard to codify what verbal predation is. There are rare instances where we might want teachers to have one-on-one conversations with students about personal subjects.

The right to opt kids out of sex ed

• It’s tempting to link gender indoctrination with sex ed because parents already have rights related to the latter under state statutes.

• But gender indoctrination is not sex ed. It’s not based on biology, it doesn’t convey useful information, and it has nothing to do with sexual orientation (except that it disproportionately preys on gay kids).

• The trans movement wants people to believe their dogma is sex ed.

• There’s bad legal precedent. Parents have already tried to expand rights against sex ed under SDP and failed.

The right to opt kids out of gender ed

What is gender?

The right to choose your child’s sex

The ACLU believes sex is socially constructed, at least in part, so this argument isn’t cra–well, I didn’t make it up, anyway.

The right to control the child’s medical treatment

• In Foote, the 1st Circuit insisted social transition is not medical while noting it might be medical in another context – leaving the door open to calling it medical when gender lobbyists ask them to. (As I’ve explained, this court is the worst.)

• The ACLU has referred to psychologists as “medical” experts. This bolsters the parents’ case here for arguing social transition is medical – especially if there’s a court ruling that adopts the ACLU’s framing.

• But truthfully, this is psychological treatment. And psychological treatment is hard to define. Discipline, for example, is a behaviorist intervention. Lawyers will have to distinguish social transition from all the other creepy little behavior-modification experiments that teachers run on kids without even thinking about it. We’re back to the question: what makes gender special?

The right “to speak and act on their [children’s] behalf”

• In a concurrence sympathetic to the parents in Lee, 10th Circuit Judge Carolyn B. McHugh quoted a Supreme Court decision called Hodgson, upholding parental notification laws as to minors seeking abortion. (The question was whether the laws violated girls’ rights.)

• This is promising. But still – schools can’t check in with parents about everything. A line needs to be drawn between gender insanity and quotidian middle school insanity. Again: what makes “gender” special?

Did the SST Policy Injure the Parents?

Parents have to show that SST deprived them of – whatever right they just defined. But as the HHS Review determined, parents can’t build a scientific argument about what SST does. They have to string together a story and schools will poke holes in it: couldn’t the child have learned about transition online? Wasn’t she distressed about something else besides gender?

Gender doctors will testify that pronoun changes have no effect on kids who are going through a phase. The psychiatrist Scott Leibowitz basically testified to this in 2020 in an expert report that leaned heavily on his own “clinical experience.”

If “cis” people carry immunity to the power of pronouns – and judges might buy that because pronouns don’t hurt them – then there’s no injury.

Does the SST Policy Help Trans Kids?

School districts claim the SST policy is necessary for kids – maybe not the ones in the lawsuit – who truly are trans. Parents shouldn’t have to address that point. But I think they do. Otherwise, credulous judges will find an excuse to rule against them. They don’t want to shoot down an SST policy that’s based on cutting-edge, life-saving gender science.

Parent advocates need to get across that SST hurts inveterate tomboys just as much as the regular girls featured in lawsuits. That way judges will feel less nervous striking down the policies.

Is “Parental Rights” Doctrine Fit for Service?

If parents establish that SST is a unique societal menace that devastates families and doesn’t benefit anyone, a shadow will fall over the courtroom as the judge realizes an amputation cult is staffing American middle schools.

Recall the parental rights precedents. The Supreme Court said parents may teach their kids German, send them to parochial school, and enroll them in soccer instead of visiting Grandma on Saturdays. Advocates want to add to that: parents may opt their kids out of the national amputation cult?

And other parents may … opt their kids in?

SST and the ideology it rode in on must be dealt with by the state. The feds need to defund schools and hospitals that trans kids. State governments should open investigations into public nuisance and fraud, and yank the teaching licenses of gender predators. School districts need to fire them. Federal, state, and local governments should criminally prosecute the trans-kid racket.

Every private lawsuit until then is a stopgap. None of the legal doctrines match the grand scope of the problem, whether it’s medical malpractice, religious freedom, sex equality, or parental rights.

The ideal school system isn’t one that shares every morsel of classroom gossip with parents and lets them pick and choose what their child learns every day. The ideal school system is one that parents trust to be normal so they (parents – but usually, mothers) can spend their time doing something better than scouring social studies textbooks for bearded women. The second vision can’t be secured by parental rights litigation; it requires the government to nuke all the groomers. So parents end up sounding like they want the pick-and-choose school system. Many judges aren’t sympathetic.

One final problem with opt-out: it’s designed to accommodate a small number of parents with outlier views. When a lot of parents exercise the right, it ends up accommodating schools with outlier views. All the most attentive parents are allowed to peacefully shield their child so they’re less likely to organize and demand the school stop warping all children.

Prognosis

I think lower courts may continue to fumble but the Supreme Court will eventually hand parents a win.

The Supremes have now heard oral argument on two very different “trans kid” cases – Skrmetti, about pediatric gender medicine, and Mahmoud, about “gender identity” storybooks for 4-year olds. It’s considering cert petitions (requests for review) in several more, with subject matter ranging from girls’ sports to censored T-shirts. The justices are acquiring a panoramic view of the gender identity circus that’s unattainable by anyone else who’s not on Substack.

When the Court denied the Eau Claire parents’ cert petition in December, Justices Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas dissented from the denial. Archconservative Alito – joined by Thomas – cast the parents’ position sympathetically and suggested other judges were relying on technicalities “as a way of avoiding some particularly contentious constitutional questions.” I expect that bold spirit will move leftward down the bench as more justices gain confidence in questioning the trans movement. Some already sounded more strident at Mahmoud oral argument (April 2025) than at Skrmetti (December 2024).

When you see the full societal context of SST, you realize it does actually resemble past parental rights showdowns. Just as in the 1920s and 90s, the state is seeking control of children thanks to a moral panic.

In the years following World War I, Americans became paranoid that European immigrants were overly loyal to the pope or conspiring in German. That’s why states cracked down on how they could raise their kids. In the late 20th century, elders worried that the nuclear family was breaking down as very young and/or unmarried women had more babies. So states empowered graybeard family court judges to meddle with these moms’ decisions based on their own evaluation of a child’s “best interests.”

In both eras, the Supreme Court threw a bucket of ice water on the hyperactive governments.

Today the country is understandably gripped by concern about cratering youth mental health. But school officials have no idea how to fix the problem. Preoccupied by the theory that right-coded forms of discrimination are the root of all suffering, they’ve decided that kids are mentally unwell because their bigoted parents refer to them by sex-based pronouns. (Also, some of the teachers and counselors seem like emotional vampires exploiting the frenzy.)

The 10th Circuit rejected Erin Lee’s position that “the transgender issue” is special. But it is special and it calls for a surgical court decision that doesn’t implicate any other topic. The Supremes should declare that teaching non-biological theories of sex to kids, or pretending kids are not members of their sex class, in public schools without parental consent is unconstitutional.

It will be peculiar for the Court to describe an unconstitutional practice in terms of a specified social fad. But that's OK. SST policies are peculiar.