This week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson, a case where a group of parents have challenged a Washington state law that allows runaway minors to access “sex-rejecting procedures” without parental notification or consent.

The question presented to SCOTUS asks: “Whether parents have standing to challenge a law or policy that deliberately displaces their decision-making role as to ‘gender transitions’ of their children, and in so doing creates present and likely future impediments to their ability to parent their children as they deem best for them.”

Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.

Currently, the “Washington Family Reconciliation Act” allows licensed youth shelters to facilitate secret gender interventions on runaway minors and withhold this information from parents whereby removing them from any gender-based medical decisions for their children.

According to the parents’ petition, who are represented by Schaerr Jaffe, LLP and the America First Legal Foundation, Washington’s law puts parents who wish to raise their child according to the child’s biological sex in the same category as abusive and neglectful parents. The law voids any requirement to notify parents of their child’s location and even can delay their reunification up to 90 days. Four of the petitioning parents have gender confused children and reportedly had to “alter their current parenting” out of “daily fear” their children will run away to a shelter where gender interventions could be secretly facilitated.

The parents first sued in November 2023, shortly after the law's amendments took effect. In July 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the parents' constitutional claims for a lack of standing, holding that the parent's harms were either "self-inflicted" or speculative because no irreversible medical interventions had yet occurred. The Ninth Circuit also declined to rehear the case with the full court. However, a dissenting judge on the Ninth Circuit warned that Washington’s statutory scheme not only “invade[s]” parental rights, but threatens to “obliterate” them.

In the amicus brief, Liberty Counsel argued that the Ninth District erred in dismissing the case because the parents do have standing. The parents have standing because:

• The First Amendment allows pre-enforcement challenges where parents do not have to wait until actual harm has occurred to file a challenge.
• Since the Washington law allows minors to threaten to run away, escape parents’ supervision, and get state-sponsored irreversible gender interventions, the law creates a “substantial risk” of injury to parents that can be heard in court.
• The Ninth Circuit ignored the First Amendment right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children by overlooking the parents’ explicit religious objections to gender interventions.

Excluding fit parents and concealing irreversible child gender interventions are not only “improper and irresponsible,” they are also “impermissible under the First Amendment,” concluded Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The parental rights issue in this case lies at the very heart of American liberty—the right of parents to direct the care and upbringing of their children.  The Supreme Court has upheld these parental rights time and again and can do so once more. The First Amendment simply does not allow a state to take physical custody of children from fit parents and usher them into irreversible and mutilating medical procedures without parental knowledge and consent. Parents have a First Amendment right to guide their children consistent with the dictates of their faith.”