Parents have won a landmark legal battle against the Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin, with Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Maxwell banning school authorities “from allowing or requiring staff to refer to students using a name or pronouns at odds with the student’s biological sex, while at school, without express parental consent.”
Parents represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) had been socially transitioning supposedly transgender children, including pre-teens, behind their backs, and even over their express objections. Judge Maxwell ruled this violated the parents’ constitutional rights.
“The school district could not administer medicine to a student without parental consent. The school district could not require or allow a student to participate in a sport without parental consent. Likewise, the school district cannot change the pronoun of a student without parental consent without impinging on a fundamental liberty interest of the parents,” Maxwell said.
“[Can] a school district can supplant a parent’s right to control the health care and medical decisions for their children? The well-established case law in that regard is clear: Kettle Moraine cannot,” he added.
“The court confirmed that parents, not educators or school faculty, have the right to decide whether a social transition is in their own child’s best interests,” commented WILL deputy counsel Luke Berg. “The decision should be a warning to the many districts across the country with similar policies to exclude parents from gender transitions at school.”
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