The Supreme Court denied a petition to hear a case challenging a Massachusetts school district’s policy of hiding student gender transitions from parents, despite the justices issuing a key ruling on the matter on its emergency docket last month.
The high court declined on Monday to take up Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, after scheduling the case for discussion at its closed-door conferences more than a dozen times. The Supreme Court did not offer any explanation for not taking up the case, and there was no public dissent of it by any justice in the Monday orders list announcing the decision.
With the Foote case, the parents of a middle school girl claim officials at her Massachusetts school secretly gender-transitioned their daughter during school hours and actively hid her use of a different name, pronouns, and bathroom facilities from her parents. The case claimed the law violated the parents’ constitutional rights by intentionally withholding information about their children.
The denied petition comes after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on its emergency docket last month to halt a similar California policy. That ruling, in Mirabelli v. Bonta, pointed to the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which upheld parents’ rights to opt their children out of LGBT materials at school and found that not permitting such an option violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
“Under long-established precedent, parents—not the State—have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children,’” the order in Mirabelli said. “The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”
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The Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the Foote case does not mean the topic of schools hiding student gender transitions from parents won’t be taken up by the justices anytime soon. Another pending petition on the issue is set to be discussed at one of the justices’ upcoming closed-door conferences, with Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County.
The Littlejohn case involves the parents of a 13-year-old daughter for whom they say a Florida school devised a secret “gender support” plan and advised staff not to inform the parents about it. The case could be scheduled for discussion as early as the high court’s upcoming conference on Friday, with a decision on whether to hear the case as soon as April 27.