There is a moment in every cultural debate when you realize the argument is no longer about policy or compassion, but about power. This case out of Maine is one of those moments.
A mother found out by accident that her 13-year-old daughter had been quietly ushered into a gender transition by a public school employee, without a single phone call home. No meeting. No consent. No warning. Just secrets.
Now, that mother is asking the Supreme Court of the United States to decide a question that never should have been up for debate in the first place: Do parents still have the right to know what public schools are doing with their children?
The answer used to be obvious. Apparently, it is not anymore.
In December 2022, Amber Lavigne was doing what parents do. She was cleaning her child’s room. That is when she found a chest binder, an item used to flatten a girl’s chest to appear male. She had not bought it. Her daughter had not told her about it.
The binder came from a social worker at Great Salt Bay Community School.
According to reporting from The Maine Wire, school staff had begun using a different name and pronouns for Lavigne’s daughter. Worse, the social worker reportedly told the child that none of this had to be shared with her mother. It would remain their secret. When Lavigne confronted school officials, she was told nothing improper had occurred. The district claimed it was merely providing a “safe, welcoming, and inclusive educational environment” in compliance with state law.
Translation: We decided we know better than you.
Lavigne sued. She argued that her constitutional rights as a parent had been violated. She did not ask for money. She asked for accountability. A federal district court dismissed her case on technical grounds, claiming she failed to establish municipal liability. The judge sidestepped the constitutional question entirely. The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.
So here we are. Not because the courts ruled parents have no rights, but because they refused to say whether they do. That silence is the problem.
Now the Goldwater Institute has petitioned the Supreme Court to step in.
READ THE FULL PETITION HERE: Goldwater Urges Supreme Court to Protect Parental Rights
The question before the justices is narrow but profound: Do parents have a fundamental constitutional right to be notified when a public school actively facilitates a child’s gender transition?
Goldwater attorney Adam Shelton put it plainly. Schools do not get to make life-altering decisions about a child’s mental and physical well-being in secret. Not in America. Not under the Constitution.
The Left will frame this case the same way they frame every challenge to their ideology. They will say this is about intolerance. They will say it is about denying “care.” They will say parents like Lavigne are dangerous.
That is dishonest.
This is not about rejecting kids. It is about rejecting secrecy. It is about rejecting a system where government employees are encouraged to wedge themselves between children and their parents.
If your argument requires hiding information from moms and dads, your argument is weak.
No school counselor should ever tell a child, “Don’t tell your parents.” That is not compassion. That is clear and obvious grooming behavior, no matter how polished the language sounds.
This case is not an outlier. The Goldwater Institute notes several similar cases are already in the pipeline, including one out of Massachusetts where a school explicitly went against parental wishes and socially transitioned a child anyway. This is becoming policy, not accident.
Public schools are increasingly operating under the assumption that parents are obstacles to be managed, not partners to be respected. Bureaucrats invoke “privacy rights” for minors while stripping parents of the very authority the Constitution presumes they have.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children. That principle should not evaporate at the schoolhouse door.
If the Court refuses to take this case, the message will be clear. Schools can experiment first and explain later, if at all. Parents will be informed only when a binder turns up in a bedroom drawer or a medical decision is already underway. That is not how trust works. That is not how education works. And that is not how a free society functions.
Amber Lavigne said it best.
Our goal as parents is to raise amazing human beings who contribute to society, who care about other human beings, and to be left out of such a life-altering decision just doesn't make sense.
Being deliberately excluded from decisions that alter a child’s identity is not inclusion. It is erasure.
The Supreme Court should take this case. It should answer the question the lower courts avoided. And it should make something unmistakably clear.
Parents do not lose their rights because a school employee thinks they know better.
If the Constitution means anything, it means that families come before bureaucracies. And if it does not, then public education has a much deeper crisis than test scores and budgets.
It has forgotten who it serves.
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