On Wednesday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee was sued over a law passed in May allowing runaway transgender-identifying minors to receive medical sex-change surgeries without parental consent or knowledge.
America First Legal (AFL) filed the lawsuit against the Washington state Governor, the state Attorney General Robert Ferguson, and the Secretary of the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families, Ross Hunter. AFL argues in the suit that the state law, SB 5599, is unconstitutional on both the state and federal levels.
The law states that if the minor left their home for a “compelling reason” shelters are not required to notify the parent or legal guardian they are accommodating their children. The law states that if “the youth is in the host home or seeking placement in a host home to receive protected health care services,” such as sex change procedures or abortion, that would be defined as a so-called “compelling reason.”
“[W]e sued the governor of Washington [Governor Inslee] to block enforcement of a new ‘state-sanctioned kidnapping’ bill that allows the state to hide kids from their parents to perform ‘gender transitions’ – including disfiguring drugs and mutilating surgeries,”America First Legal wrote on X, announcing the lawsuit.
The legal organization insists that the legislation “creates a dangerous incentive for minors who disagree with their parents on ‘gender-affirming care’ to run away to a shelter or host home.”
The plaintiffs, represented by America First Legal, comprise two nonprofit organizations dedicated to protecting children, as well as seven parents who have or had transgender-identifying children, some of whom transitioned without parental knowledge, as well as Roman Catholic and Christian parents whose faith is opposed to modern gender theory.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs state that the law “discriminatorily deprives certain parents—but not all parents—of their fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution to direct the care and upbringing of their children, as well as their rights to the free exercise of religion, due process, free speech, and equal protection.”
“No state action more frighteningly illustrates the threat to our children than this law,” America First Legal President Stephen Miller said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “This sick, authoritarian law essentially allows the state to kidnap children from their parents and hide their whereabouts to surgically and chemically mutilate them — and to formally deprive their parents of any legal ability to stop the medical disfigurement of their sons and daughters by gender extremists targeting their children.”
