By Jacqueline Huang

Since April 2025, the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) has filed or joined five amicus briefs in cases concerning K-12 schools “socially transitioning” students who have expressed a struggle with their natural identity as a boy or girl. In particular, the briefs address cases in which schools have “socially transitioned” children without parental knowledge and consent. To preserve parental rights and religious freedom, parents must be free to raise their children without undue state interference when it comes to issues of fundamental human identity and human nature, especially when shaped by religious teachings. 

In the courts, there is a precedent of honoring parental rights. The Supreme Court has maintained that parents have the right to direct the upbringing of their children free of state interference. To highlight the most recent example, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must allow parents to opt their children out of curriculum that violates their religious beliefs, including LGBTQ-themed books that promote contrary views on human sexuality and gender. The majority opinion states, “A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 218 (1972).” Mahmoud ensures that parents are allowed to raise their children in accord with their religious beliefs without opposition from their public school. When schools do not inform parents about a child’s “social transition” and do not obtain their consent, schools directly violate parental rights by replacing the parent’s judgement on human nature with that of the school’s ideology on this fundamental matter. 

Parental rights have been consistently protected by the Court, to include circumstances in which the parent’s views contradict their child’s. In Bellotti v. Baird, the majority affirmed, “Legal restrictions on minors, especially those supportive of the parental role, may be important to a child’s chances for full growth and maturity that make eventual participation in a free society meaningful and rewarding.” Parents know their children better than the state – including public school teachers, counselors, or administrators– and have the personal relationship and fundamental responsibility to navigate complex conversations and decisionmaking with their child. 

Some of the amicus briefs RFI has filed have dealt with cases in which school staff actively promoted a child’s “social transitioning” without parental knowledge or consent as in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee II, Heaps v. Delaware Valley Regional High School Board of Education, Lee v. Poudre School District R-1, Jennifer Vitsaxaki v. Skaneateles Central School District, and Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County Florida. In each case, school officials were actively indoctrinating children, denying the right of parents to raise their children according to their religious convictions.

For instance, in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee II public school officials in Ludlow, Massachusetts enacted a policy that excludes parents from knowledge or involvement in decisions as to how students’ “gender identity” is expressed and regarded at school. The parents of two children who went to a public school in this district instructed the school not to discuss the issue with their children. Instead, the school disregarded the parent’s directive. Secret online discussions revealed a school counselor claiming that the children were not safe with their parents and another staff member actively promoting the children’s “social transition.” These school staff members intruded in the lives of these families and undermined the parent’s rightful moral and legal authority by attempting to convince these students that their parents are a threat to them and encouraging them to act contrary to their parents’ wishes. Since parents are responsible for raising their children into flourishing adults and responsible citizens, their convictions must take precedence over the ideological aims of the state, particularly in the context of public schools.

Religious freedom protects everyone’s right to exercise their convictions in private and public life. It does, however, have limits, including in the parenting realm. But parents’ religiously informed decisions that involve encouraging their children to affirm their natural body come nowhere near those limits. The courts have restricted school interference in family life in many cases, and instances of school officials secretly encouraging “social transition” should be no exception. Parents may practice their faith in every facet of life, and their beliefs may be reflected in matters as fundamental as their views on human nature, all of which they must remain free to impart to their children. 

Children may have different beliefs and views than their parents, but schools cannot conceal information from parents about their children and promote expressions and behaviors that are contrary to the views the parents aim to instill in their children. A school is not responsible for raising the children entrusted to it each day. That is the parents’ responsibility. Public schools, in particular, exist to educate children in academic subjects that will help them gain job-related skills and an understanding of history and civics that enable them to fulfill the obligations of citizenship. Their role is certainly not to promote highly contested and experimental ideas about sex and gender, especially in ways that undermine parental rights and religious freedom. 

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Jacqueline Huang is an intern with the Religious Freedom Institute (fall 2025) and a student at Vanderbilt University studying economics and public policy (expected graduation, May 2026).