AFPI Applauds Supreme Court’s Decision to Hear Landmark Parental Rights Case

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) today welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to hear International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson, a case that will decide whether parents may challenge state laws that displace them in their own children's "gender transitions." The Court will hear the case during its 2026–2027 term.

AFPI filed an amicus brief urging the Court to take up the question. At issue are Washington State laws that let a runaway minor who requests "gender-affirming treatment" to receive it without parental notice or consent — laws that can keep parents in the dark about their child's location and condition and delay the child's return home. The parents who brought the challenge are the very families those laws target. Yet the Ninth Circuit threw their case out, holding that they lacked standing to sue at all.

The question now before the Court: not whether these laws are constitutional, but whether parents can get through the courthouse door to ask.

"A parental right that a parent is not allowed to defend in court is no right at all,” said AFPI chief legal affairs officer Leigh Ann O'Neill. “We are grateful the Court has agreed to decide whether that door stays open.”

The stakes reach well beyond Washington State. Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, has called the underlying issue one of "great and growing national importance," and the lower courts have split on whether parents even have standing to raise it. Until the Court settles that split, families across the Nation can be shut out of the most consequential decisions in their children's lives with no way to be heard.

AFPI's brief was filed on behalf of Erin Lee, a Colorado mother whose middle-school daughter was steered toward a gender transition at a school-club meeting the family was told was an art class—and was coached to keep it secret from her parents. Mrs. Lee's own lawsuit was turned away on procedural grounds before it could be heard on the merits.

“This is bigger than Washington state. This fight is about EVERY parent’s right to protect their child,” said Lee.

"No family should have to learn what the Lees learned the hard way," O'Neill said. "This is the Court's chance to make sure they do not have to."