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‘I think it’s important for parents to know that this is occurring in our public schools because I don’t think many parents believe that it’s as bad as it really is,’ Amber Lavigne said.
A few weeks before Christmas in 2022, Amber Lavigne was cleaning her 13-year-old’s bedroom when she stumbled upon her daughter’s secret: a chest binder. She learned that Autumn had been wearing the garment, which girls use to flatten their breasts to achieve a masculine appearance, for about two months at school in Maine, where she had adopted a boy’s name, Leo, and was using he/him pronouns.It was the first of two chest binders Lavigne found that had been provided to her eighth-grade daughter by a social worker at the Great Salt Bay Community School, according to a federal lawsuit Lavigne filed in 2023, which is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her lawsuit alleges that the public school not only aided and abetted Autumn’s gender transition but also hid the information from her parents.
“I think it’s important for parents to know that this is occurring in our public schools because I don’t think many parents believe that it’s as bad as it really is,” Lavigne said on a recent podcast. “When I was a kid, one of the first things I heard about adults is if any adult asks you as a child to keep a secret, there’s something wrong with that adult, and you need to come tell me immediately.”
“And now, I mean, it’s like we’re in upside-down land.”
The Maine lawsuit and others like it raise one of the most contentious issues in the broader conflict over transgender policies: whether a parent’s constitutional right to direct their children’s education and medical care extends to a circumstance that society has never grappled with until the past decade or so — a youth’s rejection of their biological sex, adoption of a new name and matching pronouns, and assertion of a new gender identity. And to what extent children who are transitioning or exploring gender options have the right to confidentiality if they worry about rejection and hostility at home.
Growing Backlash
Some 40 such legal actions have been filed in recent years challenging policies that require public school officials to conceal transgender and nonbinary names and pronoun changes from parents at the student’s request. It’s part of a broader backlash that has forced hospitals to discontinue medicalized “gender-affirming care” for minors, and spawned more than two dozen medical malpractice suits by “detransitioners” who underwent irreversible sex-change procedures. A jury recently awarded $2 million to 22-year-old Fox Varian, who was given a double mastectomy at age 16.
Queer advocates and their allies say the conservative focus on transgender people — and Donald Trump’s leveraging of the issue in the 2024 presidential campaign — is way out of proportion to the small numbers of trans people in society. Advocates also argue that teens have the right in a free society to express their gender identity without being “outed,” and that affirming their identities reduces rates of depression and suicide.
Critics counter that the cultural impact of such policies extends beyond the small universe of people who identify as trans. Over the past 15 years, advocates have argued that sex is not a biological fact but a socially constructed category; that there are not two but a limitless number of genders; that trans and nonbinary identities are normal and healthy, and that the refusal to acknowledge such genders or use people’s preferred pronouns is discriminatory and abusive. This cultural shift has been advanced by a host of government, corporate, academic, library, and K-12 school policies.
Separate Records
The number of K-12 students directly affected by school trans policies over the past decade is unknown, but the total could potentially be several thousand. According to parental-rights lawsuits filed through 2024, about 6,000 public schools in more than 1,200 districts authorized the concealing of student gender transitions from parents. The policies, which can allow a student to access opposite sex bathrooms and sports activities, instruct school officials to send communications home with a student’s birth name, or “deadname,” while keeping a separate set of records at school.
In January, the U.S. Department of Education, citing news coverage, said at least 300 students in California were put on “Gender Support Plans” during the 2023-2024 school year, many without parental consent or knowledge. And a 2023 Supreme Court petition said a Montgomery County Board of Education spokesman in Maryland stated that there were more than 300 secret transitions the previous year in that county alone.
The issue is especially fraught because research cited in the parents’ lawsuits indicates that up to 90 percent of children will not persist in feelings of gender incongruence if left alone. But once young people commit to a social transition with a new name and pronouns, a majority will lock into a gender incongruent identity and continue transitioning.
Some parents and jurists are also concerned about the appropriateness of the information schools are providing students. In an Ohio case dismissed on procedural grounds, a federal appellate judge appointed by President Trump wrote that the parents’ allegations about their secretly transitioning ninth-grader who attempted suicide were “beyond troubling.”
The judge noted: “The parents also learned that teachers wore badges with QR codes that students — who are young children — could scan to access pornographic content and obscene material instructing children about sexual acts.”
Some school officials see themselves as protectors of students against what they detect as bigotry from parents and society. According to a Massachusetts lawsuit, which is pending at the Supreme Court, parents learned from a teacher that their sixth-grader was secretly affirmed as “genderqueer” at school and received transgender resources from the school’s “nonbinary librarian”; the teacher was promptly fired for notifying the parents, and the district superintendent said at a public meeting that claims of “parental rights” to know about student gender identities are thinly veiled camouflages for intolerance against LGBTQ students.
The school district in Massachusetts says that parents are asserting rights that simply don’t exist.
“There is no case cited by [parents] that stands for the proposition that a parent is entitled to notice of their child’s gender so that they can control it (or attempt to do so),” Ludlow Public Schools told a federal appeals court in 2023. “While the age of a child may have some bearing on the relevant analysis, no court has established a rule that establishes a parent’s asserted right trumps the rights of an eleven-year-old or twelve-year-old who asserts their gender identity.”
Lavigne’s lawsuit is one of seven such parental rights cases seeking review at the Supreme Court. While the high court has so far rejected three petitions, lawyers who represent the parents say it’s only a matter of time until the justices agree to hear a case on K-12 gender transition policies.
Wide-Ranging Lawsuits --->READ MORE HERE
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