Lower courts did not consider whether the mother’s rights were violated because they threw out the case on procedural grounds.
The U.S. Supreme Court on March 30 turned away a mother’s appeal after a school district was alleged to have secretly aided her daughter’s so-called gender transition.
The case is part of an ongoing national debate over whether school officials have an obligation to inform parents of a child’s efforts to adopt a gender identity different from sex at birth.
Around 6,000 public schools across the country have policies that intentionally prevent parents from learning information about their children’s gender-identity choices, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch said in a case last year known as Lee v. Poudre School District R-1.
The court on March 30 dismissed the petition in Lavigne v. Great Salt Bay Community School Board in an unsigned order. The court did not explain its decision. No justices dissented.
The case goes back to December 2022, when Amber Lavigne found a chest binder in her 13-year-old daughter’s room. Also known as a chest compression garment, a chest binder compresses and flattens breast tissue to create an androgynous or masculine appearance. Lavigne learned that a social worker at her child’s public school in Maine gave her the binder and that others “socially transitioned” the child by using different pronouns and a masculine name. A school counselor said the child did not have to tell her mother about these practices, according to the petition Lavigne’s attorneys filed with the Supreme Court.
The petition said even though the school had an official policy of notifying parents and involving them in such decisions, no one from the school advised Lavigne what was happening. Lavigne sued the school board under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, a federal law that allows individuals to sue governments for civil rights violations. She alleged that there was an unwritten policy that permitted employees to make these decisions without advising parents. She argued that unwritten policy violated her fundamental right as a parent “to control and direct the upbringing of her child.”
