Case for the Wisconsin Supreme Court: Should parents be notified about their secretly trans-identifying students?

By Mary Laval

American parental rights seem to be at the forefront these days, with the Florida case, the Wisconsin case, Genspect advisor Abigail Shrier’s recent shocking revelations about what activist teachers are doing in California, and Glenn Younkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia.

Genspect sat down to talk with Luke Berg, the lawyer from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty for the Wisconsin case, which the Guardian newspaper just reported on. He described another Wisconsin case he was working on that also involves parental rights in relation to schools.

In February 2020, nearly two years before the Kettle Moraine School District case, a group of 14 anonymous Wisconsin parents sued the Madison Metropolitan School District over their policy of schools socially transitioning (e.g., using alternate names and pronouns) students without parental consent or even notification. None of these parents had children currently socially transitioning, but they were worried about the implications of the policy if their children suddenly began identifying as transgender. It also came to light that the schools have been keeping two sets of records on students, one that the parents had access to and a second secret one that includes notes to never be shown to a parent.

The case has turned partly into a battle over whether or not the parents could bring the case to the court anonymously, with the lower court conceding that schools cannot lie if directly asked by parents about the status of their child while the aspect of the case about actively notifying parents was not ruled on.

The case was thus bumped up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has been asked to rule on 1) the degree to which plaintiffs can be anonymous, and 2) whether the current policy of parents not being notified should be continued during the lengthy court process. The decision of the Supreme Court on whether to hear this case is due in the coming months. If they turn it down, it will return to the lower courts.

The petition to the Supreme Court, one of the documents Mr. Berg helped prepare, states that:

“The underlying claim in this case is that a public school district cannot constitutionally exclude parents from—and hide from them—a major psychotherapeutic intervention in their children’s lives, but must defer to parents about what is best for their children. The question presented to this Court, at this stage in the case, is whether the District’s extraordinary, what-happens-at-school-stays-at-school policy should be temporarily enjoined while this case proceeds. Answering that question necessarily involves a preliminary evaluation of the constitutionality of that policy, but the lower courts simply refused to even consider the lawfulness of that policy. The lower courts also failed to weigh the serious harms this policy can cause in the interim.”

-Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty’s petition to the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Both Wisconsin cases have been buttressed by extensive affidavits from expert and Genspect advisor Dr. Steven Levine.

Genspect hopes that knowledge of such cases will encourage other parents – in Wisconsin, across the United States, and around the world – to find out and question their schools’ shadowy “gender support plans,” which may actually be educators providing students a powerful treatment without parents’ consent or knowledge.

Image credit: WisconsinSupremeCourtSeal.gif: Wisconsin Supreme Court