On June 11, 2025, Defending Education (DE) filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief supporting the appeal in Vitsaxaki v. Skaneateles Central School District and asking the appeals court to reverse the lower court’s decision. Many of DE’s members are parents of school-aged children. The Fourteenth Amendment protects parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education, and the lower court’s reasoning would take that right away on intensely personal matters of gender identity.
The brief argues:
- Secret transitions are widespread. More and more schools let staff socially transition young children in secret, with new names, pronouns, restrooms, and field trip sleeping arrangements. DE has found that nearly a quarter of the nation’s students are covered by these policies.
- Social transition is not neutral. Most children who feel their gender doesn’t match their sex grow out of it, but most children who are socially transitioned do not. Instead, many go on to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones that can cause sterility, and experimental surgeries. Yet schools won’t even tell parents.
- Courts are leaving parents with no way to protect their rights. When parents challenge a policy, courts often say their concerns are too speculative to give them “standing” to sue. When parents challenge how a policy was applied to their own child, some courts, like the one in this case, say parents are improperly challenging school “instruction,” even though the school’s secret transition of Mrs. Vitsaxaki’s child had nothing to do with classroom teaching.
If the parental right to direct a child’s upbringing protects anything, it protects against the government transitioning a child without the parents’ knowledge. DE urges the court to reverse.
Read the full brief below:
