Supreme Court won’t hear parents’ challenge to school district hiding gender transitions
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a complaint filed on behalf of parents who oppose a policy at Maryland's largest school district allowing staff to hide if their children are identifying as the opposite sex at school.
In an orders list released Monday morning, the high court denied without comment a petition for certiorari in the case of John and Jane Parents 1 v. Montgomery County Board of Education.
For the 2020-2021 academic year, the Montgomery County Board of Education adopted gender identity guidelines that allowed schools to withhold information from parents about a child's chosen pronouns and gender identity.
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A group of anonymous parents filed a complaint against the school district over the guidelines. U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm for the District of Maryland, an Obama appointee, ruled against them in August 2022.
"The Guidelines carefully balance the interests of both the parents and students, encouraging parental input when the student consents, but avoiding it when the student expresses concern that parents would not be supportive, or that disclosing their gender identity to their parents may put them in harm's way," wrote Grimm.
Last August, a three-judge panel on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to uphold the lower court ruling, with Circuit Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, a Trump appointee, authoring the majority opinion.
Quattlebaum concluded that the parents lack standing to sue because they have "not alleged that their children have gender support plans, are transgender or even struggling with issues of gender identity."
Quattlebaum added that while "the objections to the Guidelines" might "be quite persuasive," the plaintiffs failed to "allege any injury to themselves," declaring that "opposition to the Parental Preclusion Policy reflects a policy disagreement."
"Policy disagreements should be addressed to elected policymakers at the ballot box, not to unelected judges in the courthouse," Quattlebaum continued.
Circuit Judge Paul Niemeyer, a George H.W. Bush appointee, authored a dissenting opinion arguing that panel majority "reads the Parents' complaint in this case in an unfairly narrow way, and thus denies the Parents the ability to obtain relief, concluding that the parents have no standing to challenge the Guidelines until they learn that their own children are actually considering gender transition."
The Supreme Court's refusal to hear an appeal in the case comes days after a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit ruled 2-1 that Montgomery County does not have to let parents opt their children out of the courses that promote LGBT ideology, even if they hold religious objections to the material.
