A group of Wisconsin parents is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take their case against the Eau Claire School District’s policy allowing teachers to hide child gender transitions from parents.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is representing local parental rights group Parents Protecting Our Children, filed a petition Wednesday morning with the nation’s high court asking justices to take the case after lower courts dismissed it for a lack of standing — a tactic the petition says “is one of the main obstacles courts are using to evade the merits.”
“Thousands of school districts across our country have these policies. If parents cannot challenge them until after their children are harmed, they have no way to protect their kids other than pulling them from public school,” Luke Berg, WILL deputy counsel, said in a statement. All parents suing the school district have children attending school in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and are subjected to the district policies.
“This case, and the many like it, represent one of the most significant failures of the federal judicial system in our lifetime,” the petition added.
The petition stated that policies such as the one allowing secret child gender transitions at school in Eau Claire have been adopted in more than 1,000 school districts representing nearly 11 million children. Those policies often allow any student, at any age, to claim a different gender than their biological sex at school and use different names, pronouns, and facilities, all while schools conceal those developments from parents. Nearly 30 lawsuits with a similar fact pattern as the one against Eau Claire schools exist across the country, the petition said.
“School is now like Las Vegas: ‘What happens at school stays at school,'” the petition said. “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. Indeed, even the Biden administration’s recent Title IX rule runs hard away from these policies, emphasizing that ‘nothing in the final regulations disturbs parental rights.'”
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty noted that parents in many states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York, and New Jersey, have been forced to remove their children from school and pay for alternative education in order to escape such policies.
“When a school district has an explicit policy to supersede parental authority over a major and controversial health-related decision and to conceal this from parents when the issue arises, parents are immediately harmed; they have lost their control over this critical decision,” the petition said. “Courts can remedy that harm by declaring such policies unconstitutional, enjoining school districts from applying them, and requiring schools to defer to parents, as they do for every other major decision involving a minor child.”
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The petition cited medical evidence showing that allowing children to believe they are in the wrong body, and reinforcing that message through the use of different names and pronouns, can do “long-term harm” because children become less likely over time to be comfortable in their own bodies.
It also noted that most children who experience gender dysphoria ultimately come to accept their biological sex and their bodies, so long as they are not led into a gender transition pathway with the “affirmation” theory relied upon by many in the healthcare space despite a lack of evidence that it is safe and effective.