(The Center Square) — A conservative group is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case of a Maine mother who says her 13-year-old daughter was “secretly” advised by a school social worker to begin gender transitioning.
In a petition to the high court, attorneys for the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute ask justices to consider a lawsuit filed by Amber Lavigne, who claims the Great Salt Bay Community School a guidance counselor encouraged her 13-year-old to wear a chest binder and use a different name and pronouns at school, without consulting her. Federal courts previously rejected her 2023 lawsuit.
However, Goldwater’s attorneys argued that the case also presents an opportunity for the high court to provide “uniform guidance” on the legality of school gender-identity policies nationwide, an issue the federal courts have been grappling with for years. They ask justices to affirm that “a parent’s fundamental constitutional rights include the right to be notified when public schools affirmatively recognize and facilitate a child’s gender-transition.”
‘”The underlying conduct here — affirming a gender identity that differs from a child’s biological sex, coupled with its concealment of those actions from a responsible parent — directly tests the limits of parental rights,” they wrote in the 32-page petition.
Goldwater Institute attorney Adam Shelton says by keeping this information from the girl’s mother, the school district violated the U.S. Constitution and trampled on her parental rights.
“We are asking the Supreme Court to step in and make it clear that parents like Amber have a right to know when public school officials make important decisions affecting the mental health and physical wellbeing of their children,” he said in a statement.
The request comes after the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston in July rejected a bid by Levine’s attorneys to overturn a federal court ruling last year that had dismissed her complaint.
In the lawsuit, Levigne’s lawyers detailed how she discovered a chest binder — an undergarment used to flatten breasts. She later learned her child received the binder from a social worker, who had been “secretly” advising her about gender transitioning. When she confronted the school principal and district superintendent about the secrecy, they justified the social worker’s actions.
Last year, a U.S. District Court judge in Maine dismissed Lavigne’s lawsuit, a decision that the appeals panel upheld. In that ruling, the panel’s judges said Lavigne’s attorneys had not proven that the school board had a “custom or policy” of withholding information from parents.
“This situation is really about my parental rights being violated,” Lavigne said in a statement. “It’s about a social worker who had never even had a conversation with me encouraging my child to keep secrets from me. Our goal as parents is to raise amazing human beings who contribute to society, who care about other human beings, and to be left out of such a life altering decision just doesn’t make sense.”
Maine has become a focal point in the national debate over transgender athletes in female sports since a confrontation between Gov. Janet Mills and President Donald Trump, who has vowed to withhold federal funding from states that fail to comply with his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order. Mills, a Democrat, has refused to comply with Trump’s directive.
The state is facing a lawsuit from the U.S. Education Department’s civil rights division that faults Maine’s Department of Education policy allowing transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports, claiming it violates Title IX. This 1972 law forbids discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also frozen funding to the state over the issue, and a referral has been made to the Department of Justice over ongoing trans participation in girls’ sports in the state. The state is challenging the funding withdrawal in court.
Meanwhile, conservative groups are gathering signatures to put a question on the 2026 Maine ballot that would ban trans students from participating in girls’ sports teams.
