For Immediate Release

July 3, 2024

Contact: Jeremy Newman, VP of Policy at FFP
Email: Jeremy.Newman@familyfreedomproject.org
Phone: 214-707-8445

Gender Transition Case at TX Supreme Court is the Case Everyone Got Wrong

LUBBOCK, TX – The TX Supreme Court Case that Everyone Got Wrong – The Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Loe v. Texas on June 28, 2024, represents a critical shift in the protection of parental rights. In the case, the ACLU challenged a state law preventing children from receiving gender transition drugs and surgeries.

For over a century, American courts have acted as guardians of parental rights, ensuring that government intrusion into the family could only occur under the most stringent constitutional scrutiny. This principle has protected parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s education, religious upbringing, and medical care. The state has only been permitted to interfere when necessary to protect children from significant harm. However, the recent ruling by the Texas Supreme Court has altered this landscape.

Jeremy Newman, VP of Policy at the Family Freedom Project, released the following statement about the case:

Gender transition drugs and surgeries cause devastating, lifelong harm to a child’s body and SB 14 was carefully crafted to prevent this harm without unnecessarily burdening other parental decisions. This was all that the Texas Supreme Court needed to find in order to protect both children and parental rights in its ruling. Instead, the Texas Supreme Court opened a backdoor into parental rights through which the state can now come and go mostly undetected and with minimal judicial oversight. Those who urged the court to open this backdoor and weaken parental rights will likely someday find themselves arguing against the precedent they set in this case. 

Justice Debra Lehrmann, the lone dissenter, warned that this ruling jeopardizes parental rights by not applying a consistent standard of scrutiny.

The Family Freedom Project is dedicated to protecting parental rights from government intrusion, ensuring that the state may only overrule parental rights when necessary to protect a child from significant harm.

Read Family Freedom Project’s full article on this story here.