A lawsuit filed against a Fort Collins, CO school district over its policy to not notify parents about students’ transgender identities has been dismissed three times. Now, after its dismissal in April by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, the plaintiffs are officially appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case now awaits the approval of the nation’s highest court.
After U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang initially dismissed the civil case in December 2023, Erin Lee and the other plaintiffs refiled Lee v. Poudre School District (PSD), only to be dismissed by Judge Wang once again. They then appealed that decision to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which earlier this year affirmed Wang’s ruling, again granting defendants’ motion to dismiss.
This was first reported by The Daily Signal.
The Supreme Court only agrees to hear a small fraction (about 1%) of the 7-8,000 cases petitioners submit every year, and typically only when two or more circuit courts have issued differing rulings on an issue.
Here’s what you should know about Lee v. PSD, the case’s background, and where it might go from here.
The lawsuit’s origin
The lawsuit contends that PSD students were lured into a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting under the guise of an “art club,” where, allegedly, a guest speaker convinced the plaintiffs’ children they were transgender; afterwards, students were told it was not necessary to inform their parents of what had taken place in the meeting, and that later PSD staff did not disclose this information to parents.
The lawsuit further alleges that the incident harmed the families involved, by causing the students to experience “gender and sexuality confusion that required counseling and included suicidal thoughts.”
The Fort Collins Coloradoan reported extensively on these allegations in May 2022, a year before the federal lawsuit was filed.
The plaintiffs argue that the school’s policies discouraging disclosure of students’ gender identities violated parents’ constitutional rights to the “care, custody and control of their children” under the 14th Amendment.
The 10th Circuit’s ruling countered that the parents had failed to prove that the policy itself was the cause of their injury. However, U.S. Circuit Judge Carolyn McHugh’s concurring opinion argued that, while the district court’s dismissal was correct, the school district’s policies on not disclosing information about students’ gender identity to parents still ran counter to parents’ constitutional rights to control of their children under the 14th Amendment.
Erin Lee, one of the parents involved, is the closest thing the case has to a figurehead. Since first making her allegations public in 2022, Lee has very quickly become a prominent voice among a group of Colorado conservative activists with Christian nationalist ties aiming to push transgender people out of public life.
RELATED: Fort Collins Activist’s School Lawsuit Spearheaded by Christian Extremists
Lee is now the executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, a coalition of such activists which, in 2024, organized a series of ballot initiatives, including one to bar transgender youths from participation in school sports and another to require schools to out transgender students to their parents. Both failed to receive enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
National legal groups at work
While the lawsuit is based in Colorado, it also has ties to national far-right groups. Lee’s lawyer, J. Brad Bergford, is a graduate of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship program. The Blackstone program, run by the national group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), aims to train Christian lawyers to impact culture” and previously described its mission as seeking “to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.”
ADF has had its hands in numerous other anti-LGBTQ legal battles at the Supreme Court, including Colorado’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents right-wing extremism in the U.S., has designated ADF as a hate group for its vocal opposition to same-sex marriage and medical care for transgender people.
The main national organization involved in Lee’s case has been the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, at the time AFPI’s Chair of Constitutional Litigation Partnership, was prominently involved in the case during its initial stages. Bondi has since become the U.S. Attorney General under President Donald Trump. As Florida Attorney General, she had previously fought in court to uphold the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
As the lawsuit approaches the Supreme Court, it may be welcomed by a conservative majority which has tended to favor right-wing approaches to LGBTQ issues. After siding with the majority in overturning Obergefell v. Hodges’ national right to abortion in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas said that the court should consider revisiting prior rulings which blocked bans on gay marriage and sodomy, among others.
Most recently, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s statewide ban on youth gender-affirming care.
Appealing to the Supreme Court’s docket is the next step to being heard, but it is not a guarantee. Only a limited number of these cases are given a writ of certiorari, meaning that the Supreme Court will hear arguments and ultimately make a ruling. Similar cases revolving around schools’ transgender policies and parental rights, after being defeated in lower courts, have also been appealed to the Supreme Court.
In an interview on KNUS Radio’s The Jeff and Bill Show this week, Lee said, “And there are multiple cases like ours that have been filed. There’s Foote vs. Ludlow, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom. I know January Littlejohn’s case out of Florida will also be appealed to the Supreme Court. And so it’s possible they’ll take one of the other cases. And if one of us wins, we all win. It’s also possible that they could consolidate the cases. We don’t expect that we will hear their decision to hear these or not until fall when they come back for the next session.”
Acknowledging this, Lee gave an ultimatum: anti-trans activists in Colorado and other states will continue filing lawsuits until they get the results they want.
“It eventually will be handled,” Lee told host Jeff Hunt. “I’ll tell you that. Whether it’s our case, this session or another case in the next one, these issues are not going to go away and these cases are not going to stop being filed to the Supreme Court until one of them is heard. So I am really confident that one way or another, whether it’s Lee vs. Poudre School District or another place, this will be settled. And unfortunately, the lawsuits will have to keep flying.”
