Something powerful is happening across America. Ordinary mothers and fathers are going to extraordinary lengths to rescue, shield, and walk alongside their children in the face of a gender ideology that has embedded itself in schools, courtrooms, and social service agencies. Call them tiger parents. They are fierce, they are loving, and they are winning. As a mother, I would do anything to protect my children from the devastating distortions of gender ideology. So would every parent in this story.
President Trump introduced one of them to the nation at Tuesday’s State of the Union. Michele Blair — Sage Blair’s grandmother and adopted mother — is a Virginia mom who reportedly discovered, when Sage was 14, that school officials had been secretly affirming the girl’s desire to be treated as a boy, without ever telling Michele. When Michele found out, Sage broke down and ran away. She was allegedly abducted, taken across state lines, and raped and drugged by multiple men.
A school counselor then testified against Michele in court, though Michele said she had been kept in the dark until hours before her daughter fled. A judge separated them. Sage was placed in a facility for high-risk teenage boys, and she reportedly suffered further abuse, ran away again, and was found by law enforcement in Texas in the custody of another predator. Michele never stopped fighting. Sage is now home, restored, and studying on a full scholarship at Liberty University. No therapist, no caseworker, no ideologically driven school counselor saved Sage Blair. Her mother did.
The harm Sage Blair suffered was not an accident or an aberration. It was the foreseeable consequence of an ideology that tells children their bodies are mistakes, that the adults who love them are obstacles, and that the state and its approved experts know better than the people who love them.
In Maryland, a coalition of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian parents stood up for their children when Montgomery County schools eliminated parental opt-outs from LGBT-themed storybook instruction — for children as young as 4. The school board insisted it knew better than families how to form young children on questions of sex and identity.
The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling 6-3 last June that the board’s no-opt-out policy unconstitutionally burdened the parents’ free exercise of religion. The financial reckoning that followed sent a message to school districts nationwide: A court ordered Montgomery County to pay $1.5 million in attorneys’ fees to the winning families. Districts that deny parents the right to shield their children from instruction that violates their religious beliefs will face serious consequences.
In Vermont, Pastor Brian Wuoti and his wife Katy had been foster parents since 2014, eventually adopting two brothers they had fostered. Fellow pastor Michael Gantt and his wife Rebecca specialized in caring for babies born with drug dependencies — the state loved the Gantts so much it put them on the Today show. Then Vermont demanded that all foster parents affirm gender ideology as a condition of licensure.
The Wuotis and Gantts said they could love any child but could not lie to a child about who they are. Their licenses were revoked. They sued. Vermont settled this month, agreeing that sincerely held religious beliefs “shall not be considered in the licensing process.” The Gantts put it simply: “There are more kids in the foster-care system than there are families to care for them. Our focus throughout this case has been on the children. …”
In Colorado, the state built a “universal” preschool program and then told Catholic parishes they could participate — so long as they abandoned Church teaching on sexual orientation and human identity. The price of the subsidy, in other words, is the surrender of the faith. Catholic families who refuse that bargain pay full tuition out of pocket while their tax dollars underwrite everyone else’s preschool — a hardship that for some has meant forgoing preschool entirely, undermining the very interest the state claims to be serving.
A petition to review the case, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, is now before the Supreme Court, with Catholic families submitting their stories in an amicus brief I filed on their behalf and the federal government similarly arguing in an unprecedented certiorari-stage amicus brief that what Colorado calls universal is anything but.
Just this week the Supreme Court handed another landmark victory to California parents fighting state efforts to keep them deliberately in the dark about their own children “transitioning.” Affirming the rights of parents, the court noted California’s policies “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.” The plaintiff parents in Mirabelli v. Bonta are identified in court records only by pseudonyms, a telling reminder of how much is still at stake for parents who dare to push back.
One set of parents had no idea their daughter had been presenting as a boy throughout seventh grade; at parent-teacher meetings, no one said a word. They learned the truth only after their daughter tried to commit suicide and ended up in a hospital. Another set of parents took their concerns directly to their seventh-grade daughter’s principal, having suspected the school was socially transitioning her behind their backs. The principal told them state law forbade disclosure without the child’s consent. The parents moved their daughter to another public school, as a private school was out of reach.
The tiger parent’s work is never done, and the threats keep multiplying. But so do the victories.
The lesson of every story recounted above is the same: Nobody — not a school, not an agency, not a court — loves a child the way a parent does. Not the Vermont bureaucrats who stripped the Wuotis and Gantts of their licenses. Not the Montgomery County school board that fought all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost, and then paid millions for the privilege of losing. Not the Colorado officials who decided that Catholic families could fund the universal preschool program but not benefit from it. Not school principals or teachers in California. Parents took on these fights because of one simple truth: Their children are worth fighting for.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project. She is a mother of 10, a Stanford-educated lawyer, and appears frequently in Catholic and secular media to discuss religious freedom controversies and to lend her legal expertise when discussing judicial matters.
