A coalition of parents, psychiatrists, school districts and state attorneys general has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case regarding school districts that they claim are imposing gender ideology on children.
Two Massachusetts parents are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case against Ludlow school officials, who they accuse of secretly encouraging their daughter to adopt a new gender identity. Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri claim that staff at Baird Middle School urged their 11-year-old child to use a male name and alternative pronouns while concealing this from them, despite their requests to be involved.
According to Alliance Defending Freedom, whose attorneys are representing the parents alongside Child & Parental Rights Campaign, when the issue was addressed to school officials, “The superintendent called parental rights a ‘thinly veiled … camouflage’ for ‘intolerance, prejudice and bigotry against LGBTQ individuals,’ saying that Ludlow ‘need(ed) to do more,’ not less, to inculcate gender ideology in kids. The school committee chair also demeaned parents’ concerns about secretly transitioning children as ‘prejudice and bigotry.”
In now-former superintendent Todd Gazda’s statement, he added, “At its core, this current controversy isn’t about sex, it’s about identity. It is about ensuring a safe environment with caring adults that students can rely on to discuss problems, issues or questions they might have. For many of our students, school IS their only safe place, and that safety evaporates when they leave the confines of our buildings.”
In April 2022, the parents sued the Ludlow School Committee, alleging that the district violated their parental rights. A federal district court dismissed the case that December, prompting the couple to appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Alliance Defending Freedom filed an amicus brief in support of the parents in March 2023, but in February 2025, the First Circuit upheld the dismissal. That July, ADF joined with the Child & Parental Rights Campaign to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.
Since filing it with the U.S. Supreme Court, more than 15 friend-of-the-court briefs have been submitted in support of the case.
In their request for the Supreme Court to hear the case, the parents’ attorneys said that the question presented, “Whether a public school violates parents’ constitutional rights when, without parental knowledge or consent, the school encourages a student to transition to a new ‘gender’ or participates in that process,” needs an “urgent” response because “more than 1,000 have adopted secret transition policies.”
Utah Attorney General Derek Brown joined with 20 other states, headed by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, to file a brief in support of the plaintiff.
“Ludlow’s actions should trigger alarm bells,” the filing said. “These secret acts, which contravened the parents’ express instructions, violated the constitutionally sacrosanct parent-child relationship. But rather than answering the alarm, the First Circuit greenlit further public intrusions into that relationship, empowering schools to seize control.”
In a separate amicus brief, Our Duty-USA and Colorado Principled Physicians said:
“It is hard to imagine anything more central to parental rights than the decision to raise one’s child as his or her sex, an aspect of the self that goes to the core of human existence,” they wrote. “Many courts, however, have begun rejecting the axiomatic truth that sex is real and immutable. They have instead erroneously determined that parents seeking to raise children to accept their sex is somehow beyond the bounds of their parental rights.”