SCOTUS Rejects Case About Colorado School Hiding Sex Transitions from Parents

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to a take up a case from parents challenging a Colorado school district’s policy allowing staff to conceal a student’s “gender identity” from parents.

Two sets of parents with minor children at Wellington Middle School in Poudre School District R-1 asked the High Court to revive their lawsuit after lower courts dismissed the case on procedural grounds without considering the merits of the case. The parents argued the “District Secrecy Policies” usurp their parental rights in violation the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

“In addition to excluding parents from decision making, these policies explicitly call for concealment of students’ gender identities from parents unless and until the student and the school decide to involve them. Thus, under such policies, parents’ fear that the school district might make decisions for their children without their knowledge and consent is not speculative,” parents argued in their petition. “Despite this reality, courts enable this blatant interference with parental liberty to continue. This Court’s intervention is therefore necessary to afford Petitioners their day in court on the merits through overturning the denial of leave to amend and to re-establish the existence and the breadth of parental rights with respect to the care, control, and upbringing of their children.”

The school district argued in its reply brief that the Supreme Court should decline to take up the case because parents are essentially seeking an “advisory opinion” outside the purview of federal courts. 

“[T]he parents seek an advisory opinion that would fail to afford them any relief from the rulings below, and this is the wrong case to consider whether a public school employee’s alleged discouraged disclosure regarding gender identity and expression implicates a fundamental right,” the brief reads.

While the conservative-majority Supreme Court ultimately denied the parents’ petition, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a statement joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch warning lower courts not to avoid confronting these kinds of school district policies.

“I concur in the denial of certiorari because petitioners do not challenge the ground for the ruling below. But I remain concerned that some federal courts are tempted to avoid confronting a particularly contentious constitutional question: whether a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process,” Alito wrote. 

“Petitioners tell us that nearly 6,000 public schools have policies—as respondent allegedly does—that purposefully interfere with parents’ access to critical information about their children’s gender identity choices and school personnel’s involvement in and influence on those choices,” he continued. “The troubling—and tragic—allegations in this case underscore the great and growing national importance of the question that these parent petitioners present.” 

The Supreme Court has recently ruled in several high-profile LGBTQ+-related cases against policies pushed by transgender activists. In June, the court upheld a Tennessee law banning sex changes for minors, enabling states with similar laws to do the same. The Supreme Court then sided with Maryland parents of various faiths who sued their school board over its refusal to allow their K-5 children to opt out of LGBTQ+ curriculum.

During the October session, the court heard a case challenging Colorado’s law mandating an affirmation-only approach for counselors with regards to sexuality and “gender identity.” In the coming months, the court is expected to hear two cases related to transgender athletes. 

The case is Lee v. Poudre School District R-1, No. 25-89 in the Supreme Court of the United States.