On June 29, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Senate Bill 5599, a horrendous Washington law that allows the state to kidnap a child from their parents without any court review. The Supreme Court will also review the legality of a Washington law which allows children as young as 13 to receive outpatient treatment without a parent’s consent. There were 20 briefs filed in support of the court taking the case. They came from individuals, religious organizations, parent rights groups, and political coalitions. In this article, we will review the issues underlying this case and explain why it is highly likely that the Supreme Court will rule in favor of restoring parents rights here in Washington state.
In a case called International Partners for Ethical Care versus Ferguson, five sets of Washington parents (who have children suffering from gender confusion) challenged a 2023 Washington state law called Senate Bill 5599 – a law that allows the state to kidnap their children and hide them from their parents if the parents do not agree to give their kids toxic Trans Drugs. The state will then give the kids these deadly drugs without their parents consent. The parents filed in federal court but their complaint was rejected by truly insane judges in the Ninth Circuit who claimed that the parents lacked standing – despite the imminent risk of losing their children to state-sponsored child abuse.
The parents, who are represented by a non-profit legal group, then filed a 40 page Petition to the Supreme Court on January 7, 2026.
The crucial question their Petition is asking the Supreme Court to decide is this:
“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?”
The obvious issue with the Washington law is that it assumes that parents are guilty without any court review – violating the parents rights to due process. But in addition, the law permits the state to inflict permanent harm on the children – including permanently sterilizing the children – without the parents consent. The draconian law not only invades parents rights, it destroys them. The parents are not even allowed to know where their child is at or to play any role in the decision making process.
Misinformed legislators justified the bill by claiming that getting kids addicted to toxic Trans Drugs and cutting off their body parts would reduce their risk of suicide. In fact, several studies have shown that giving kids Trans Drugs and cutting off their body parts increases their risk of committing suicide.
Here are some quotes from the Parents Petition:
“Viewing parents as the problem, Washington passed laws that deliberately target certain parents by supplanting them with the state in the context of gender-confused runaway minors.”
“Whenever a child runs away, so long as he or she asks for “gender affirming treatment,” a cascade of events is triggered. First, the child is referred for “gender-affirming treatment” without parental notice or consent. Second, parents can be kept in the dark as to the child’s location and condition. And third, reunification can be significantly delayed, with conditions for that reunification uncertain and entirely up to the state.”
“Nothing in the statute requires any finding that parents kicked a child out of the home or committed any other neglect or abuse.“
“This (Trans Drug Cult) care can send a minor down a road of “gender-affirming treatment” that could cause irreversible sterilization and sexual dysfunction, as well as other devastating physical and psychological consequences to the child and serious harm to the parent-child relationship.”
“The law requires no independent efforts to identify and notify parents. Furthermore, if initial contact is unsuccessful—say, because the child refuses to provide contact information or a correct name—the minor may stay in the shelter for as many as 90 days. There is no guarantee when or if a parent will learn the fate of their runaway child.”
“Thus, parents will not know their child’s location or condition. This amendment thus targets and deprives certain parents—for whom there is no suspicion of neglect or abuse—including Petitioners here, of crucial knowledge about their child and the ability to promptly reunite with their child.”
“Washington “law thus places parents who wish to raise their child in accordance with the child’s biological sex in the same category as parents who are abusive or neglectful. Both categories of parents lose any entitlement to be notified of their runaway child’s location.”
“Four of the Petitioner Parent couples have children who struggle with gender confusion (with most of those children being secretly transitioned at their public schools).”
“Resolving the standing issue here will provide guidance to dozens of suits around the country in the closely related context of school policies designed to secretly transition children. More than 1,200 districts, covering 21,000 schools and twelve million children, maintain those policies.”
My note: Nearly 300 schools districts in Washington are forced to comply with this child kidnapping policy – harming over one million school children in our state.
“See Parham v. J. R., 442 U.S. 584, 610 (1979) (“Pitting the parents and child as adversaries often will be at odds with the presumption that parents act in the best interests of their child.”); Quilloin v. Walcott, 434 U.S. 246, 255 (1978) (“We have recognized on numerous occasions that the relationship between parent and child is constitutionally protected.”)
“The parents should not have to wait until their child has run away to a shelter and received life-altering treatment before they are afforded the opportunity to challenge the law—a law whose very object is to prevent the parents from knowing of their child’s arrival at the shelter and his or her receipt of ‘gender-affirming’ treatment… Petitioners must have standing to challenge these laws before irreversible harm befalls their children. “
On May 14, 2026, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown filed a shockingly insensitive brief in opposition to the Parents Petition – a brief in which he attempted to defend putting life altering decisions in the hands of children rather than in the hands of their parents.
On June 2, 2026, the Parents filed a 17 page reply to Nick Brown’s brief.
Here are quotes from the Parents Reply brief:
“Respondents (aka Nick Brown) cannot dispute that Washington’s regulatory regime facilitates the covert transitioning of children without parental knowledge or consent.”
“Respondents say nothing about the all important incentive the laws create for gender-confused children to run away.”
‘While Respondents focus only on the harm of parents being denied information, (the recent Supreme Court Parents Rights decision in) Mirabelli also noted the harm of “being shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”
“The (Washington anti-parent) laws have the effect of blocking parents from participating in mental health decisions for their children just as (the California anti-parent laws did) in Mirabelli.. In fact, here the laws block parental action even more than in Mirabelli: Parents cannot pick up their child from a runaway shelter when they are not told where the child is, unlike the parents in Mirabelli, who can easily pull their child out of a public school.”
“Given the massive threat posed by these laws, “the real harm to parents from Washington’s legal regime happens long before a child runs away”— because “intentional interference with the parent-child relationship, be it direct or indirect, creates an injury to the fundamental right to parent.”
Steps to restore Parents Rights
It might take a year or more for the Supreme Court to issue a decision in this case. But given the recent Supreme Court Parents Rights emergency decision in Mirabelli, it is highly likely that the Supreme Court will find that Senate Bill 5599 violates fundamental parent rights. However, this will only address the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of the harm being inflicted on parents and children here in Washington by the State legislature.
In the past 8 years, the Washington legislature has passed more than a dozen anti-parent laws. Ultimately, we need to get rid of these anti-parent legislators and replace them with legislators who respects and honors Parents Rights.
If you want to help restore Parents Rights in Washington State, please share this article with your friends and neighbors. Also, please take the time to attend our next monthly meeting of our Washington Parents Network – on Sunday, July 5, 2025 from 4 to 5 pm. We will review this case as well as the Supreme Court Girls Rights decision and the Girls Rights Initiative and our plan to eventually restore both Girls Rights and Parents Rights here in Washington State. If you are interested in attending this meeting (and are not already on our meeting list), send me an email and I will email you a link to the meeting. We look forward to meeting you!
Regards,
David Spring M. Ed.
David (at) WashingtonParentsNetwork.com