When the Supreme Court denied a petition in October to review Erin and Jonathan Lee’s lawsuit against a northern Colorado school district accused of secretly manipulating their 12-year-old daughter to believe that she was a boy, the Christian couple was profoundly disappointed.
“The state-mandated religion of Colorado is gender ideology,” Erin says. “It reigns supreme, and it’s a spiritual battle.”
The battle has cost the mother of three her corporate career in human resources, brought death threats, led to a break-in at her home, and alienated her and Jonathan from family and friends.
But the Fort Collins, Colorado, couple, who professed their faith in Christ and were baptized with their daughter in the summer of 2024, say their personal trials have helped them discover new life in Christ and His calling to stand for truth.
“In this journey, being who we were before, we’ve lost just about every earthly relationship and thing,” Lee says. “But for every person that was removed, five good people were brought into our lives who pray for us.”
And their fight for religious liberty and parental rights in schools is not over.
Lee, who co-founded a parental rights advocacy organization called Protect Kids Colorado, is helping with a movement to secure 200,000 signatures each for three ballot initiatives: to ban sex change surgeries on minors, prohibit biological males from competing in female sports and to punish sex-traffickers with life in prison without parole.
“I’ve learned there are two battlefields,” Lee says. “There’s the ground game and there’s the air game. So, we’ve got a lot of work to do on the ground—and that’s where the church does belong in the public square—with changing laws and filing lawsuits and proclaiming the truth in places that need to hear it. But then there’s the air game. We have to pray and cover our families.”
Lori Gimelshteyn, a Christian mom and founder of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN) launched in 2022, says that Bible-believing parents are increasingly under attack by their state government, which has codified laws to define non-gender-affirming parents as child abusers.
“We have now been compelled by law that we can no longer use biological pronouns or birth names in places of public accommodation, including churches,” she says. “… We have so many families, my family included, where we believe in biological reality, we believe that God created male and female, and we’re being forced to accept a lie.”
But Gimelshteyn, who walked away from her profession as a speech pathologist rather than adhere to gender-affirming requirements to maintain her medical license, is not bowing down to Colorado’s transgender dogma. CPAN is suing the state for enforcing its gender-affirming statutes.
“We’re helping 28 families in Colorado who are navigating gender ideology issues,” she says. “And four of those families, who are public facing, have actually lost custodial rights of their children for not affirming their newly declared gender identity.”
Meanwhile, among the petitions still up for consideration before the Supreme Court is a case involving January and Jeffrey Littlejohn, whose 13-year-old daughter was socially transitioned in a Florida school district without their knowledge.
“When the Littlejohns found out and asked the school to stop, the school refused,” their petition states. “When the Littlejohns asked to participate, the school said they had no right. And when the Littlejohns asked for records of the meetings with their daughter, the school said those records were private.”
Lee and Gimelshteyn, who are fighting for their God-given rights and Biblical responsibility to raise their children in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord,” remain hopeful that the high court will choose to hear the Littlejohns’ case. And if it does, a precedent-setting ruling last summer could bode well for the Florida parents.
In June, the justices ruled 6-3, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, that a group of Maryland parents have a right to opt their children out of instruction that uses LGBTQ+ themes. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “[a] government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”
Sarah Parshall Perry is an attorney and vice president of Defending Education, a national parental rights advocacy organization based in Arlington, Virginia. The nonprofit leverages investigative reporting, civil rights complaints and federal litigation while training a network of 200,000 parents to protect their constitutional and God-given rights to raise their children according to their convictions.
“More than 12 million students attend schools in districts with express policies that dictated that a child’s gender identity information must be hidden from his or her parents under the guise of required federal privacy laws,” Perry says. “Now more than ever, it is important that we be bold, that we stand up for truth, that we assert our rights as parents, that we help our children assert their rights as students and that we make sure to protect not only this precious gift of liberty but the fact that we have a moment right now where there is a surge of support behind us.”
For example, in the Lees’ petition for review of their Colorado lawsuit, Alito, in a dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, noted the case presented “a question of great and growing national importance.”
“But I remain concerned that some federal courts are ‘tempt[ed]’ to avoid confronting a ‘particularly contentious constitutional questio[n]’: whether a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process,” Alito wrote.
And several justices have already indicated interest in considering the issue of parental rights verses the government’s educational responsibilities.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Alito and Thomas previously wanted to accept a challenge brought by Wisconsin parents concerned about their district’s policy, but the petition was denied in December 2024 by the other six justices.
An appeals court had dismissed the Wisconsin case because none of the challengers actually had kids who were socially transitioned under the policy.
Kristen Waggoner, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) president, CEO and chief counsel, warns that, by some estimates, nearly 6,000 public schools have policies to socially transition children without any parental involvement.
Making the argument personal, Waggoner said in November during a debate at the Federalist Society: “There’s a reason that my 17-year-old boy needs to get my consent from the school before he goes even to a pumpkin patch, or takes a pill that’s an Advil. And that’s because I am the parent and the school recognizes that.
“And yet we are willing to disrupt the parental relationship. A school official thinks that it has that kind of authority. That is not constitutional, and it doesn’t serve a compelling interest, nor is it narrow-tailored.”
Erin Lee, who describes herself as a former leftist, suddenly found her life in a tailspin when her sixth-grade daughter, Chloe, came home from “art club” after school in May 2021 and announced that she was a boy. Lee believes the number of kids identifying as LGBTQ is the result of a social contagion. So, when she caught on to the ruse underway at Wellington Middle School, Lee withdrew her daughter and enrolled her at a private Christian school.
She says the transgender movement preys on young girls when they are most vulnerable. “But if parents would just take a step back and think, ‘OK, puberty has been part of the human existence since Adam and Eve started having kids,’ you would think some common sense might prevail at some point.”
A Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) report, which was peer reviewed by several medical and psychological professionals, concluded that because gender-transition treatments on minors are dangerous and not evidence-based, schools should be further deterred from socially transitioning students.
“Children experiencing gender dysphoria need love, support, and medical care rooted in biological truth—not life-altering drugs and surgeries, says Jonathan Scruggs, ADF’s senior counsel and vice president of litigation strategy.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which oppose laws restricting transgender treatments on children. “They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. That is not medicine—it’s malpractice.”
Tony Perkins, Family Research Council president, says the data serve as a reminder that science will always eventually align with the Bible.
“Science, when pursued honestly, eventually catches up to Biblical truth,” Perkins posted on social media. “This new federal report confirms what many have long warned—that rushing vulnerable young people into irreversible procedures was driven more by ideology than evidence. It vindicates every parent, pastor, doctor, and policymaker who refused to bow to the deception of this age.”
