School’s Gender Identity Protocol Puzzles First Circuit Judges

The First Circuit appeared open Wednesday to the idea that parents have a constitutional right to be alerted when their child uses new pronouns at school, but cast doubt on whether that right extends to choosing how teachers refer to their child.

The panel of judges during oral argument weighed the matter in a lawsuit brought by parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, who sued the Ludlow, Massachusetts School Committee over a teacher’s failure to tell them that their child began identifying as genderqueer.

The parents claim the well-established constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their child extends to ...