Is SCOTUS Ducking Transgender School Cases?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

If anyone feels that the transgender issue has been won by conservatives, think again. In the past eight days the U.S. Supreme Court has ducked not one, but two, important cases in which public schools encouraged students to socially transition to the opposite sex without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Social transitioning means adopting a name, pronoun, clothing, and gender expression suitable to the opposite sex. Many public schools have a policy of reinforcing such behavior by students and concealing it from their parents.

The latest denial of cert by SCOTUS was on Monday, on a petition by parents which had been supported by many amicus briefs. Nearly half the states joined a brief in support of parents to be informed and have control over what public schools are doing to push their children toward transgender behavior.

In just the last two years, the Supreme Court has turned away five transgender cases in which parents object to the secret transitioning of their children in public schools. This latest denial by SCOTUS arose from a lawsuit initiated by Florida parents, in which the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sided with the public school despite the swing vote on the three-judge panel describing the school’s treatment of the parents as “shameful.”

In that case, a 13-year-old girl had delays in development and struggled with learning, and began doubting her gender. Her parents hired a private therapist and informed the school that they were opposed to social transitioning.

But even in Republican Florida, school officials were allowed to meet secretly with the child, label her as “nonbinary,” mandate that all school personnel refer to her as “they” or “them,” allow her to use boys’ bathrooms, and prohibit anyone from informing her parents. The school rejected the parents’ objections, denied their request to participate in this process, and refused the parents’ request for school records of meetings with their own daughter.

The school was acting pursuant to a parental-exclusion policy, which the Eleventh Circuit held was “executive” conduct that parents could not prevail against. In an opinion that the swing judge sided with but said “makes no sense,” the Court held that parents must first prove that an infringement on their rights “shocked the conscience” to compel a school to comply with the parents’ request.

A week earlier, the Supreme Court likewise refused a petition by two Massachusetts parents who had “repeatedly directed their public middle school not to interfere with the upbringing and mental healthcare plan for B.F., their eleven-year-old daughter.” Despite the parents’ objections, “school officials followed district protocol and secretly facilitated B.F.’s social gender transition anyway” and treated her “as though she were nonbinary.”

The entirely Democrat-appointed First Circuit panel sided with the public school by holding that an 11-year-old’s desires had priority over parental rights, and that this transgender issue supposedly did not concern her mental health. The public school even provided counseling to facilitate the gender transition of the child despite the parents’ objections, and the First Circuit sided with the school.

With these two latest denials of cert, the Supreme Court has now denied petitions for its review from anti-parent decisions by the First, Fourth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits. In each case, often over dissent by a conservative appellate judge, the federal judiciary sided with schools as they secretly transition children without the knowledge or even over the objection of the parents.

Washington, D.C., is the transgender capital of the world and the Supreme Court justices and their clerks are immersed in that culture. The percentage of law students who are transgender also continues to climb, who become law clerks at the Supreme Court to do most of the work in screening cases for review.

The Supreme Court did intervene in an emergency appeal from a case in California, to reinstate a district court injunction against a California law that prevented public schools from notifying parents about their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Captioned Mirabelli v. Bonta, this case continues to be litigated in federal court in California and does not directly affect the rest of the country.

This case is based on a “religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs,” the 6-3 Supreme Court wrote in temporarily siding with the parents. California’s opening brief is due on July 6 in the left-leaning Ninth Circuit, which has previously held against parents.

It was this same Ninth Circuit that infamously declared two decades ago that a parent’s right over her child’s upbringing “does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door.” Phyllis Schlafly then led such an uproar against that arrogant denial of parental rights that the court extraordinarily amended its decision to reword its much-criticized statement. SCOTUS then denied cert in that case, too.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.