195. What Schools Tell Your Kids Not To Tell You | Kate Anderson

Oct 6, 2026

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Parental rights in schools are being quietly erased, and most parents have no idea it's happening until it's too late. In this episode I sit down with Kate Anderson, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom and director of its Center for Parental Rights, to talk about the schools that are secretly transitioning kids to a different gender without telling their parents. Kate has spent the last ten years litigating these cases across the country, and she walks me through real stories, a twelve year old girl in Wisconsin, a mother in New York who wasn't told for months, and a family in Michigan who caught it just in time. We talk about the statistic that should alarm every parent, six thousand schools known to have these policies, and what the Supreme Court might do next. If you are raising kids or grandkids and sending them to school, I don't think you can afford to skip this conversation. I would love to hear what you think, so leave a comment, subscribe if you haven't already, and share this with another parent who needs to hear it.

Kate is a graduate of Gonzaga University School of Law, where she earned her JD magna cum laude, and she spent her early career litigating civil and criminal cases in Seattle before joining Alliance Defending Freedom about ten years ago. Today she leads a team of six litigators focused entirely on protecting parental rights in schools, and she brings a calm, thoughtful presence to a subject that gets people fired up fast. We spend a lot of time on how school gender transition policies actually work in practice, the gender support plans, the dual naming systems where a child goes by one name with teachers and another at home, and the way some administrators will use one name with the child and deliberately use the child's real name whenever they talk to the parents, just to keep the deception going. Kate walks through the Wisconsin case in real detail, a twelve year old girl whose parents fought to protect her through a difficult season of depression and body image struggles, only to find the school working against them. We talk about the phrase some parents are told, that they could have a live son or a dead daughter, and how that kind of pressure gets used to push families toward decisions they were never given the full picture on. Kate also gets into the medical side of this, how some clinics are providing puberty blockers and hormones to minors without parental involvement, and why the emerging research out of Europe is starting to shift that conversation. We talk about Mahmud v Taylor and the Massachusetts case Kate is hoping the Supreme Court will take up next, and what that could mean for parental rights across the entire country. Underneath all of it is something I keep coming back to, that social transition without parental consent doesn't just cut parents out of a decision, it teaches a child that the adults who love them most can't be trusted, and that breaks something in a family that takes a long time to rebuild. Kate and I also talk about what actually helps, requesting curriculum, showing up at school board meetings, building real community with other parents, and why keeping parents in the dark should never have become normal in the first place.

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