A major court has ruled that parents don’t have the right to know that their child is changing genders while at school.
The opinion, from the First Circuit Court of Appeals, determined that it does not violate parental rights for a school to transition a child without the parents’ knowledge.
“[P]arental rights are not unlimited,” the court ruled. “Parents may not invoke the Due Process Clause to create a preferred educational experience for their child in public school.”
“As per our understanding of Supreme Court precedent, our pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children,” the court continued. “And the Protocol of nondisclosure as to a student’s at-school gender expression without the student’s consent does not restrict parental rights in a way courts have recognized as a violation of the guarantees of substantive due process.”
The decision comes from a case in Massachusetts, where in 2020 a Baird Middle School student referred to in court documents as B.F. began questioning her identity after she received “unsolicited LGBTQ-themed video suggestions” on her school-issued computer.
The student, in sixth grade at the time, was given an assignment along with her fellow students to create biographic videos about themselves and to include their pronouns in those videos.