(LifeSiteNews) – The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed an amicus brief with the United States Supreme Court, urging them to recognize parents’ rights to challenge a Washington law enabling runaway children to be “transitioned” without parental consent.

In 2023, the state enacted a law giving shelters the option of notifying state agencies instead of parents when runaway children come to them seeking “gender-affirming care.” This, combined with state law allowing children as young as 13 to get outpatient medical treatment without parental consent, means confused teens could flee to Washington and “transition” before their parents even find out where they are.

The children and parental rights nonprofit Partners for Ethical Care is challenging the law, specifically the Ninth Circuit agreeing in May 2025 with a lower court ruling that the parents lacked standing to sue. The nation’s highest court agreed to take up the case this past June; oral arguments are slated for December.

This month, the Trump DOJ filed an amicus brief supporting the challengers, arguing that parents do indeed have standing to defend their rights to direct their children’s medical care.

“Washington’s interference with petitioners’ ability to direct and manage their children’s medical care inflicts a traditional harm upon them, which gives these parents standing under this Court’s precedents,” the brief argues. “This Court has long held that the relationship between a parent and child is itself constitutionally protected. That includes parents’ fundamental right to decide what medical care their child may access. When a State restricts that control, and alters the authority parents would otherwise possess over their children, that alone inflicts a here-and-now injury upon objecting parents.”

“Here, Washington has inserted itself into the parent-child relationship and meaningfully displaced parents’ control over their children’s medical care, by giving children an independent means to access services that would otherwise be forbidden,” it continues. “In shutting parents out from this decision, and providing such information without (indeed, against) their permission, the State arrogates to itself an important aspect of the traditional parent-child relationship, and has changed the preexisting rule that parents decide these questions of care. Nothing more is needed for standing. It does not matter whether petitioners’ children have taken advantage of the state-revised parenting dynamic, or will do so soon.”

DOJ says the Ninth Circuit ruled otherwise on the grounds the parents had not established it was likely enough their children would run away to transition for their rights to be harmed by the law. DOJ finds this “myopic,” because as “soon as a State restricts parents’ control over the medical care their children may access, and thus alters the traditional authority those parents would otherwise possess over their children, objecting parents suffer a current harm. The court below instead focused entirely on downstream injuries—an approach that would also mire courts in impossible judgment calls on emergency timetables, with standing turning on a court’s independent assessment of parents’ good-faith fears that their child is really about to flee home or otherwise take a State up on a direct offer of services.”

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.

In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of [so-called] gender care for children,” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through gender transitions had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under transitioning before returning to their true sex, 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.

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”

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