Should you have the right to decide when your kids learns gender identity?

I don't recall reading, this book in third grade. Although I had a crush on my teacher (who identified as a female).

Gender Storytime at the Supreme Court

If elementary schools read children’s books with LGBTQ themes, can parents opt out?

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

April 20, 2025 2:40 pm ET

Does the First Amendment give parents a right to opt out of gender ideology at the local public elementary school? The Supreme Court will consider that Tuesday in Mahmoud v. Taylor, and what a sign of the times. Consider two of the storybooks that parents in Montgomery County, Md., say the district added to its reading curriculum:

“My Rainbow” is about an autistic child named Trinity who says, “I need long hair,” because, “I’m a transgender girl.” It ends with a surprise gift from Trinity’s mother: a teal, pink, and purple wig.

“Born Ready” is about Penelope, who tells her mother: “I don’t feel like a boy. I AM a boy.” After this single discussion, the mother answers with unquestioning affirmation: “Yes. We will make a plan to tell everyone we love.”

Teachers in Montgomery County were also given guidance on replying to classroom questions and comments. One idea was to “disrupt” students from “either/or thinking” about the sexes. If a child suggested it’s “weird” to say a girl can become a boy, the proposed response was to explain how this comment is “hurtful,” and that when each of us is born, “people make a guess about our gender.”

Many families objected, including the Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox plaintiffs. In their telling of the facts, they initially were offered a chance to opt out of the storybooks. But the school district quickly reversed and then said it wouldn’t inform parents when the books were going to be read.

Montgomery County replies that it sought to supplement its reading program with LGBTQ characters to “reflect the diversity” of its families. At first it “tried to accommodate parent requests to opt their children out of class,” until that “became unworkably disruptive,” because of “unsustainably high numbers of absent students.” For the record, “My Rainbow” has since been removed, though the county doesn’t explain exactly why.

The parents rely on the precedent Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which the Court said Amish families couldn’t be made to send their children to school past eighth grade. If the First Amendment protects dropping out, how can it not cover a “much narrower request” by parents wanting merely to skip “discrete instruction that deliberately seeks to confound their religious values”?

Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by virtue of their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” such exceptions.

They can’t? Public schools accommodate a lot, including students who are disabled or learning English as a second language. Part of living in a pluralistic society is that some families might reject, say, ideas on evolution. Their children can still benefit from learning algebra and “Romeo and Juliet.” How hard would it be for Montgomery County schools to announce that “Born Ready” will be read in three weeks, and students can be excused?

This gets to the parents’ second argument, which is that the district’s policy isn’t neutral, and the ending of opt outs was targeted. Their brief cites a member of the school board saying it’d be an impossible disruption if teachers had to “send out notices so white supremacists could opt out of civil-rights content.” The implicit comparison is between religious families and racists. Who needs a tolerance lesson?