Christin Heaps v. Delaware Valley Regional High School Board of Ed., et al. 

Defending Education is a national, nonprofit membership association. Its members include many parents with school-aged children. Launched in 2021, it uses advocacy, disclosure, and litigation to combat the increasing politicization and indoctrination of K-12 and postsecondary education. It has a substantial interest in this case. The Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children. The logic of the district court’s decision deprives parents, including members of Defending Education, of this fundamental right on intensely personal matters of gender identity.

Introduction

Facing parents of public school children is an explosion of policies that allow school personnel to socially transition their young children—giving children new names, pronouns, restrooms, and field trip bunks—in secret. Defending Education has found that nearly a quarter of the nation’s students are subject to these policies. These “social transitions” are not neutral interventions. While the overwhelming majority of children with gender incongruity grow out of it, most children who are socially transitioned do not. Rather, they go on to increasingly invasive and irreversible interventions—puberty blockers, sterilizing cross-sex hormones, and experimental genital surgeries. Yet schools are refusing to even tell parents that they are setting their children on this dangerous pathway.

If the fundamental parental right to direct a child’s upbringing protects anything, it protects against state-sanctioned transition of a child without parents’ knowledge. But courts are leaving parents with no way to vindicate this right. When parents challenge a school’s policy, they are often told that their concerns are too speculative so they lack standing. And when parents challenge a school’s application of its policy to their child, some courts—like the one below—say that a school’s concealment of its transition does “not rise to the level of active deception” that would interfere with parents’ rights. To correct this deprivation of parents’ rights, the Court should reverse.