Andrew Chung
April 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a request from parents suing a Massachusetts public school district where teachers and officials withheld names or pronoun changes from parents to support students’ gender identities without their children’s consent.
A lower court has rejected an appeal by the parents of a student who identifies as “genderqueer” at a middle school in Ludlow, Massachusetts, after a judge dismissed their appeal.
The plaintiffs allege that officials identified their children as non-binary and withheld that information from them, violating their basic parental rights protected by the due process promise of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The case follows a major court decision on March 2 banning similar measures in California that could restrict the sharing of information about a transgender public school student’s gender identity with parents without their child’s permission.
Controversy over supporting and protecting the privacy of transgender and gender non-conforming students is playing out across the United States. In 2024, the court rejected similar challenges in Wisconsin and Maryland.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, also faces escalating efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration and Republican-led states to restrict transgender rights. In June 2025, the court upheld a Tennessee Republican-backed ban on providing gender-affirming medical care to transgender minors. In January, the court also appeared poised to uphold a state law banning transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams, but a ruling on the issue is still pending.
Massachusetts parents Stephen Ford and Marisa Silvestri said in court documents that teachers and officials at Ludlow Baird Middle School pushed “gender ideology” on children without the parents’ knowledge. As a result, the plaintiffs say, their 11-year-old child, known as “BF,” began questioning the student’s gender identity.
After asking teachers and staff to use the new name and pronouns, the student also asked school officials to continue using the child’s original name and female pronouns when communicating with parents, according to court documents.
The child identifies as genderqueer, meaning someone who does not adhere to binary gender norms of male and female.
The parents sued the town, the Ludlow School Board and certain officials, saying their actions undermined their Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, which the Supreme Court has long held protect the fundamental right of parents to direct the care and upbringing of their children.
Parents say “so-called gender transition” is harmful and their objection is a moral one, not a religious one. They are represented on the Supreme Court by the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.
A federal judge dismissed the case in 2022. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld the dismissal in 2025, finding that the parents had not sufficiently demonstrated that they had been deprived of their parental rights, including directing the child’s medical care.
The 1st Circuit said it “is not convinced that merely charging Ludlow with using a gender-affirming pronoun or a gender-affirming name is sufficient to claim that the school provided medical care to the student.”
The 1st Circuit said school officials respected students’ wishes about whether to disclose their gender identity to parents, allowing children to “express their identities without fear of parental backlash,” adding that the agreement did not force students to withhold information or limit parents’ behavior outside of school.
“Parents remain free to try to mold their children to the parents’ own beliefs,” the 1st Circuit said.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
