FRENCHTOWN, New Jersey (LifeSiteNews) – Twenty-two states are backing a New Jersey father’s fight against a school district he says “socially transitioned” his gender-confused daughter without his knowledge or permission.
The New Jersey Monitor reported that in fall 2023 Christin Heaps’ daughter told a counselor at Delaware Valley Regional High School she wished to be called by a male name and pronouns, and they did so without running the change by him. Heaps discovered it through another parent that December and told school staffers to stop as it interfered with therapy she had been undergoing since middle school for a variety of maladies, including depression, anxiety, gender dysphoria, and her mother’s death in early childhood.
The school refused, citing the 2018 pro-trans state guidance Policy 5756 that says parental approval is not needed to affirm students’ “gender identity.” Heaps withdrew his daughter from the school, now homeschools her, and says she no longer identifies as a boy. But he is persisting with the lawsuit in hopes of striking down the state guidance and sparing other families his experience.
“Defendants seek to honor major life choices of minor children related to their education, mental, and physical health without the parents’ fully informed consent, while also attempting to keep such choices secret from parents, as in this case, which violates the long-recognized constitutional principle that custodial parents ‘possess what a child lacks in maturity, experience, and capacity for judgment required for making life’s difficult decisions,’” his suit argues.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is backing Heaps in the case, as is a friend-of-the-court brief led by Montana and joined by 21 other states: the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia; and the legislature of Arizona.
“Parents like Mr. Heaps have a legal duty as well as a biological imperative to keep their children safe,” Montana argues. “Correspondingly, the constitution recognizes that parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children and to instill in them moral standards and beliefs.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
