Fit Parents Must Not Be Branded Unfit for Rejecting Gender Ideology

Washington, DC - February 18, 2026

On February 17, 2026, Dr. Simone Gold and the AFLDS legal team filed an amici curiae brief with the Supreme Court of the United States in support of the Petitioners in International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson (25-840), urging the Court to grant certiorari and reverse the Ninth Circuit’s decision denying parents access to the courts while Washington State displaces them from medical decision-making regarding their own gender-confused children.

This case exposes the real-world consequences of Washington State’s 2023 Family Reconciliation Act amendments. Under state law, if a minor runs away and claims to be seeking “gender-affirming treatment,” the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Family Services (DCYF) may withhold the child’s location and condition from parents, delay reunification, and facilitate medical interventions without parental notice or consent. Parents who refuse to affirm gender confusion are treated as presumptively unfit, even in the absence of any due process of law and any finding of parental abuse or neglect.

The harms are severe and immediate. The Petitioners are not policy advocates observing from a distance. They are mothers and fathers raising children struggling with gender confusion, including one child who has already run away before. These parents do not affirm gender ideology. They seek to raise their children in accordance with biological reality. They now live under a legal regime that incentivizes vulnerable children to flee, empowers the state to withhold critical information, and clears a path for interventions that can permanently alter a child’s body and future. Yet when these parents sought judicial protection before irreversible harm occurs, both lower courts dismissed their case.

This case centers on a foundational constitutional principle: the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children is among the oldest fundamental liberty interests recognized by the Supreme Court. That principle is meaningless if parents must wait until their child has been sterilized, surgically altered, or psychologically cemented into an irreversible pathway before they may seek relief.

America’s Frontline Doctors maintains the position that so-called “gender-affirming” interventions are not neutral health care. As documented in our amici curiae brief, secret behavioral affirmation is not a harmless accommodation. It is the first step in an ideological process that conditions children to reject biological reality and normalizes a trajectory toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, irreversible sterilization, permanent loss of sexual function, lifelong medical dependency, and surgical mutilation of healthy bodies. Parents have the fundamental right and duty to intervene before their children are placed on that path.

AFLDS attorney David Dalia said, “This case presents a direct and deliberate usurpation of the parental role. Washington’s law does not merely intrude upon parental authority. It obliterates it. Standing doctrine cannot be manipulated to shield that usurpation from constitutional review. When parents are the very target of a statute, they must be allowed into court to defend their families.”

AFLDS Founder and President Dr. Simone Gold added, “Unlike totalitarian countries, the law in America protects parents from acting as though children are wards of the state. They belong to their parents. Gender ideology denies biologic reality and demands obedience to a false construct over truth. The government does not have the authority to brand fit parents as unfit simply because they refuse to participate in medical mutilation. Parents answer for their children before God and before the law, not before bureaucrats. The Constitution protects families, not ideology.”

This case carries national significance. Alongside Mirabelli v. Bonta, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, and other pending parental rights cases, International Partners v. Ferguson will help determine whether parents retain the constitutional authority to raise and protect their children, or whether states may evade judicial review while asserting control over children under the guise of “protected health care.”

Stay tuned as AFLDS continues to fight nationwide to defend parental rights, protect children, and restrain unlawful government usurpation.

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Media Contact Lisa Alexander, Communications Director | Media@AFLDS.org