Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 07:1 (Spring 2025)
Article: Limits Of Parental Rights Regarding Transgender Children
Author: Jonathan Whitehead

Eikon 7.1 (Spring 2025) p. 16

Limits Of Parental Rights Regarding Transgender Children

Jonathan Whitehead

Jonathan Whitehead is a lawyer near Kansas City, Missouri and First Amendment litigator; he served as co-counsel in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), and Carson v. Makin (2022), challenging government discrimination against religion.

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The Law And Parental Rights

Some of the thorniest issues in our culture are occurring at the overlap of church, state, and family.

Modern evangelicals are, perhaps, most comfortable thinking of these things as separate. The Baptists largely convinced most Reformed Protestants of some kind of separation between church and state. Abraham Kuyper famously described “sphere sovereignty,” in which government, church, and family maintain independent and inviolate charters directly from Scripture. Thus, the state cannot interfere in the church; the family remains separate from the church, and vice versa.

But individuals, of course, have duties to each sphere, and each sphere has duties to individuals. Like the Venn diagrams that confused us in high school, if some areas are clearly separate, there are also areas that touch or overlap. Defining these boundaries can be demanding.

These questions are especially difficult when family, church, or state try to push beyond their realm of jurisdiction, or fail to fulfill the duties within their right jurisdiction.

The United States Supreme Court has taken up two cases this term that concern the overlap of the state and the

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family. The court is not a stranger to church and state separation, the topic of the Constitution’s First Amendment. But it rarely speaks about the relationship of state and family — in part, because family relations are usually considered a matter for individual states. But when it does speak, it tends not to speak again on the issue for years or decades. So evangelicals should have a keen interest in the arguments considered and the opinions rendered this term, as we may be stuck working out the implications for some time to come.

U.S. v. Skrmetti

The first of the cases is U.S. v. Skrmetti. In 2023, the State of Tennessee adopted a law that prohibits doctors from claiming to offer treatments that involve allowing “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”

Tennessee’s law effectively banned the use of hormones to change a minor’s �...