The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case brought by parents who argue that their local school district violated their rights when teachers used pronouns and names different from those on students’ birth certificates.

The Court did not explain why it would not hear the appeal in the case, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee.

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The case, originally filed in 2022, involves four parents from Ludlow, Massachusetts, who say that their children were “allowed” to identify as transgender at the school, which violated their rights. The schools allow their kids to request to be referred to with certain pronouns, and the parents allege that the district banned teachers from outing students to their parents.

The suit states that in September 2019, sixth-grade students in Paul R. Baird Middle School were asked to make videos in which they stated their gender identity and pronouns. When their parents objected to school administrators about the assignment, the school allegedly told them it wouldn’t be repeated without requiring parental permission forms, their lawsuit alleges.

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Those parents also say that the district’s former superintendent, Todd Gazda; the middle school principal, Stacy Monette; and the teachers ignored their wishes and addressed both of their children by names and gender identities that don’t match the ones listed on their children’s birth certificates. Their child changed their preferred name at school at least twice since December 2020 without getting permission from their parents, The Boston Globe reported.

The district says that it has no formal policy on trans students. The parents say that not writing down the policy violated their due process rights.

The parents said that the district violated their right to determine the upbringing of their child because calling a trans person by their pronouns is a form of medical care for “social transitioning.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected their appeal, finding they failed to show that using pronouns constitutes medical treatment.

“The allegations here do not involve clinical conduct at all,” the appeals court ruled. They added that parental rights have never been thought to include “the right to control a school’s curricular or administrative decisions.”

“Today’s denial by the Supreme Court is a missed opportunity to defend parental rights,” said Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Chief Counsel Jim Campbell. ADF is an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group representing the Massachusetts parents.

The Supreme Court refused to hear a similar case in December 2024 involving parents in Wisconsin who alleged that their kids’ school district didn’t outo their kids to them. The district didn’t ban teachers from outing trans kids, but also didn’t require them to.

However, the Supreme Court overturned a stay on a California law that banned teachers from outing trans kids to their parents. It was in a lawsuit where two Christian teachers argued that their religion requires them to out trans kids to their parents, and the district lost the case at the trial level but is still appealing the ruling.

Outing trans youth to their parents puts them at increased risk of homelessness, according to the Williams Institute. Not only that, young students might still be exploring their identities and need to exercise control over their coming-out process.

“Transition isn’t a flick of a switch; it’s a complex, gradual, weaving journey of identity,” Connie Walden, a trans woman, wrote to the New York Times in 2023.

“My own transition started in high school. At what stage between my experimenting with makeup now and then to asking specific friends to call me Connie would I have officially, suddenly, socially transitioned?” she wrote. “When should I have been robbed of the right to come out to my own family, to decide when to include them in my own process?”

“I recognize the pain of well-meaning parents who feel that their child kept such a large ‘secret’ from them,” she continued. “Yet with transition being a gradual process of experimentation, there is no big secret. There’s only kids slowly figuring out who they are, like all other kids.”

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