Pushing back on the crazy

That we ever reached this point in the first place, with hundreds of school districts and the nation’s largest state adopting policies to secretly transition students from their birth gender without informing parents, is itself crazy. But crazy seems par for the course in gender policy in the past decade, with children undergoing life-altering surgeries and courts finding it “cruel and unusual punishment” if taxpayers do not pay for those same surgeries for prisoners. The nation is pushing back—hard—on the crazy, and the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday validating parents’ rights will be a landmark in our collective fight for sanity.

Parents have filed a score of lawsuits across the country challenging school district policies that hide gender transitions from them. They are often joined in the litigation by teachers who do not want to lie to parents, and who assert a religious or speech right to tell parents the truth about their child’s struggles. The cases have often failed on standing, a doctrine requiring an actual injury to bring a case. Of course, that raises the question: How are parents supposed to know whether their rights have been violated if the district’s policy is to keep their child’s transition secret from the parents?

Finally, one courageous federal judge in California saw enough and issued a full and final ruling against a state Department of Education policy requiring secrecy from the Golden State’s public schools. Unsurprisingly, the liberal U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, and the case came to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture. To this point, the Supreme Court had turned aside several prior requests for a normal appeal on this issue, and several such petitions are pending right now, but this case the court had to decide because an actual injunction had been issued, then stayed.

Monday’s ruling on the court’s motions docket (sometimes derisively called the shadow docket) will be no less impactful for being short (the main opinion is just seven pages) or unsigned (no single justice is credited with authoring it). Rather, though the court is likely to now take one or more petitions for a full appeal of a secret transition case, the justices’ cards are all on the table.

Six justices, the court’s conservative bloc, collectively agreed that the secret gender transition policy violate the parents’ religious rights and their inherent rights as parents to raise their own children. Just last term, the court issued an important ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor recognizing the right of religious parents to opt their children out of curricular content on LGBTQ issues that conflicts with their religious values. At the time, the court limited its ruling to just the First Amendment free-exercise right of religious parents and did not address the harder question the inherent right of parents to raise their children.

The court did not shy from that question this time. I characterize it as “the harder question” only because the law is less developed. A century ago, in a pair of cases, the court held that one aspect of the liberty protected by the Constitution is the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children (the cases were Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925 and Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923). Those cases sat dormant then for a hundred years, with judges hesitant to second-guess elected school boards.

No longer. The court’s majority squarely held on Monday that “parents—not the state—have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’” That broad right “includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.” Because California’s policy secretly transitions students without their parents’ knowledge or consent, it violates this principle.

Only time will tell the full impact of this decision. And though the holding is clear, the reasoning is very brief in this abbreviated opinion. In the short term, it will mean the end of secret gender transitions in dozens of school districts nationwide. Any district that continues such a policy is asking to lose a lawsuit and pay the parents’ attorneys’ fees. But the broader implications will have to be worked out over time as the court relied on its favorite tools—history and tradition—to give greater definition to the scope of this right.

For now, though, conservatives, parents, and people of faith can celebrate a ruling that ends the insanity and comports with the Constitution.