A Pennsylvania court has ruled in favor of parents who accused a Pennsylvania public school district of violating their civil rights by teaching first-grade children concepts such as gender dysphoria and gender transition.
Carmilla Tatel, Stacy Dunn, and Gretchen Melton are mothers of three first-grade students in Mt. Lebanon School District in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, who brought a case against the district, its school board, and one of its first-grade teachers, Megan Williams. The parents claimed that Williams, herself a mother of a transgender child, read aloud to six- and seven-year-old students books that discussed gender transitioning, played a video in class called “Jacob’s New Dress,” and “explained to her students that sometimes ‘parents are wrong’ and parents and doctors ‘make mistakes’ when they bring a child home from the hospital.”
The school district violated the parents’ constitutional rights by refusing to give families the right to opt their children out of such lessons, Joy Flowers Conti, a senior district judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled last week.
“A teacher instructing first-graders and reading books to show that their parents’ beliefs about their children’s gender identity may be wrong directly repudiates parental authority,” Conti wrote in an opinion. “Williams’ conduct struck at the heart of Plaintiffs’ own families and their relationship with their own young children. The books read and Williams’ instruction to her first-grade students taught that gender is determined by the child – not, in accordance with the Parents’ beliefs, by God or biological reality.”
“[Williams’] conduct showed intolerance and disrespect for the religious or moral beliefs and authority of the Parents,” she continued. “A reasonable jury could only find that conduct, without a compelling governmental interest being shown, in the elementary school violated the Parents’ fundamental constitutional rights to control the upbringing of their young children.”
Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Vincent Wagner said in a statement on Tuesday that school districts violate a parent’s right to direct the upbringing of their child “by leaving parents out of key decisions about their own children.”
“The school district here failed to notify these parents about instruction their young elementary schoolers would receive on the sensitive topic of gender identity,” Wagner said. “Worse, it instructed these kids that their parents might be wrong about whether they were boys or girls—striking at the heart of parents’ role in forming their children’s identity. Parents’ fundamental, constitutional right to make decisions about how to raise their children includes the right to the information they need to make those decisions. Without notice and a real chance to opt their children out of instruction like this, parents can’t exercise their constitutional rights.”
The parental right to opt out has, in recent years, become an increasingly divisive subject. State laws commonly allow parents to opt their children out of lessons that discuss sexually explicit material, which some parents say include radical teachings about sensitive topics such as gender reassignment or transgenderism.
“Plaintiffs are not trying to control each and every aspect of their children’s education — only noncurricular teaching to their young children about a sensitive topic. The Parents only seek relief related to their children and recognize other parents may choose not to opt their children out of instruction about sensitive topics, like transgender issues,” Conti wrote. “In other words, the Parents seek only to have effective prior notice and the ability to opt their own young children out of that kind of instruction.”
Pennsylvania’s case closely mirrors a case pending in the neighboring state of Maryland. Religious families in Montgomery County School District have for years been embroiled in a lawsuit against the district, which parents say forced students to listen to radical instruction on gender and sexuality. Although the district originally provided parents with an opt-out option, MCPS abruptly and without explanation removed that right. Represented by Washington, D.C.-based law firm Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, parents are now petitioning the Supreme Court to reinstate the opt-out.