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Transgender Teen’s Mother Asks Supreme Court to Recognize a Parent’s Due Process to Control Her Child’s Life

Posted on: July 27th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

Anmarie Calgaro is one angy mama!  Despite being defeated at every turn in the lower courts, and despite her child having reached age 18 and thus no longer being subject to her parental control as a matter of law, she is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse decisions by the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. District Court for Minnesota, and to establish that governmental and private entities should not be allowed to shut out a parent from continuing to control her transgender teen, even after the teen has left home and is living on her own.

 

The decisions in the lower courts are Calgaro v. St. Louis County, 2017 WL 2269500 (D. Minn. 2017), affirmed, 919 F. 3d 1054 (8th Cir. 2019), petition for certiorari filed, July 26, 2019, No. 19-127.  The Respondents have a filing deadline of August 26.

 

Calgaro is suing St. Louis County, Minnesota; St. Louis County Public Health and Human Service’s former director, Linnea Mirsch; Fairview Health Services and Park Nicollet Health Services, non-governmental health care providers; St. Louis County School District; Principal Michael Johnson of the Cherry School in that district; and, not least, her child, identified in court papers as E.J.K.

 

The Petition filed with the Supreme Court in Calgaro v. St. Louis County, No. 19-127 (docketed July 26, 2019), presents a factual narrative that differs a bit from that provided by the lower court opinions.  The Petition refers to E.J.K. by male pronouns, despite E.J.K.’s female gender identity, and tells the story from the perspective of a mother confronting misbehaving adults who were wrongfully treating her child, male from her perspective, as if he was emancipated and could make decisions on his own without notice to or approval by his mother.  She was particularly concerned that these adults (governmental and non-governmental) were assisting her child in gender transition without giving her an opportunity to object.

 

The gist of the story is that the teen, identified as male at birth but who came to identify as female, was living with her mother and younger siblings, but decided at age 15 to move out to live with her biological father for reasons not articulated by the courts or the Petition, but one can imagine them.  (From the court’s reference to “biological father,” one hypothesizes that E.J.K.’s biological parents were not married to each other.)  She stayed with her father only briefly, then staying with various family and friends, refusing to move back in with Calgaro, who claims that she has always been willing to provide a home for E.J.K.

 

After leaving her mother’s home, E.J.K. consulted a lawyer at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid.  The lawyer “provided her with a letter that concluded she was legally emancipated under Minnesota law,” wrote District Judge Paul A. Magnuson.  E.J.K. never sought or obtained a court order declaring her to be emancipated.  But this letter, which by itself has no legal effect, was used effectively by E.J.K. to get government financial assistance payments that ordinarily would not be available to a minor who is not emancipated, to persuade two health care institutions to provide her with treatment in support of her gender transition, and to persuade her high school principal to recognize her gender identity and to treat her as emancipated and to refuse to deal with her mother’s requests for information and input about E.J.K.’s educational decisions.  All of these steps were achieved by E.J.K. without notice to Anmarie Calgaro, who claims to have been rebuffed at every turn in her attempt to find out what was going on with the child to whom she referred as her “son.”

 

The essence of Calgaro’s claim is that in the absence of a court order declaring that E.J.K. was emancipated from her parents, none of these things should have happened.  Relying on  cases finding that parents have Due Process rights under the 14th Amendment concerning the custody, control and raising of their minor children, she claims that each of the defendants violated her constitutional rights by failing to give notice to her of what was happening, failing to afford her some kind of hearing in which she could state her position, and shutting her out from information about her child.

 

She had specifically requested from Cherry School Principal Johnson to have access to E.J.K.’s educational records, but was turned down.  She asked the government agency and the health care institutions for access to E.J.K’s records concerning her health care and her government assistance, but was turned down again.  Who knew a Legal Aid lawyer’s opinion letter could be so powerful!

 

District Judge Magnuson dismissed Calgaro’s lawsuit on May 23, 2017.  As a practical matter, E.J.K. was then less than two months from turning 18, at which point she would become a legal adult and emancipated as a matter of law, so Calgaro’s request for injunctive relief would quickly become moot.

 

The trial court rejected Calgaro’s argument that the county, the school district, the health care institutions, or the individual named plaintiffs had violated Calgaro’s constitutional rights by declaring her child to be emancipated, for, the judge concluded, the defendants “did not emancipate E.J.K. and Calgaro continues to have sole physical and joint legal custody of E.J.K.”  The question remaining is what flows from the fact that until turning 18, E.J.K. continued to be a minor in the custody of Calgaro, even though she was no longer living at home and was effectively managing her own life without parental guidance.

 

Turning first to the health care institutions, the court pointed out that they are not “state actors” but rather private, non-profit entities, so the Due Process Clause does not impose any legal obligations on them, and they could rely on the Legal Aid lawyer’s letter and act accordingly without accruing any liability under the federal constitution.

 

As to the school district, the court found that the district could not be held liable for actions of its employees, only for its own policies or customs, and there was no evidence that the school district had any particular policy or custom regarding how to deal with transgender students or their parents.  “Calgaro fails to provide any facts that the School District executed a policy or custom that deprived Calgaro of her parental rights without due process,” wrote Magnuson.

 

As to Principal Johnson, the court found that he enjoyed “qualified immunity” from any personal liability for the actions he took as principal of Cherry School, so long as he was not violating any clearly-established constitutional right of Calgaro, and the court found no support in published court opinions for a constitutional rights of parents to have access to their child’s school records.

 

The judge also rejected Calgaro’s argument that the County violated her rights by providing financial assistance to E.J.K. without Calgaro’s consent or participation.  The County was providing assistance based on its interpretation of a Minnesota statute that allows payment of welfare benefits to some who does not have “adequate income” and is “a child under the age of 18 who is not living with a parent, stepparent, or legal custodian” but “only if: the child is legally emancipated or living with an adult with the consent of an agency acting as a legal custodian,” with “legally emancipated” meaning “a person under the age of 18 years who: (i) has been married; (ii) is on active duty in the uniformed services of the United States; (iii) has been emancipated by a court of competent jurisdiction; or (iv) is otherwise considered emancipated under Minnesota law, and for whom county social services has not determined that a social services case plan is necessary, for reasons other than the child has failed or refuses to cooperate with the county agency in developing the plan.”

 

Judge Magnuson pointed out that under this statute, the county was not necessarily required to give E.J.K. financial assistance – it was a discretionary decision by the local officials – but that as with her suit against the school district, Calgaro failed to identify a policy or custom that would subject the county to liability.  The court found the county could not be held liable for violating Calgaro’s Due Process rights based on the decision by county officials to provide benefits to E.J.K., and that the head of the county welfare agency, also named a defendant, could not be sued because there was no evidence she had anything to do with the decision to provide the benefits.

 

Furthermore, Calgaro could not sue E.J.K. “Calgaro stops short of making the absurd argument that E.J.K. deprived Calgaro of her parental rights without due process while acting under color of state law,” wrote Magnuson, who found that as all of Calgaro’s other claims had to be dismissed, any claim against E.J.K. had to fall as well.

 

Calgaro appealed to the 8th Circuit, which issued a brief decision on March 25, 2019, affirming the district court in all particulars.  Furthermore, noting the passage of time, Circuit Judge Steven Colloton wrote, “Calgaro’s remaining claims for declaratory and injunctive relief against the several defendants are moot.  E.J.K. has turned eighteen years old, ceased to be a minor under Minnesota law, and completed her education in the St. Louis County School District.  There is no ongoing case or controversy over Calgaro’s parental rights to make decisions for E.J.K. as a minor or to access her medical or educational records.”

 

Calgaro tried to argue that because she has three minor children other than E.J.K., she has a continuing interest in establishing as a matter of law that the various defendants should not be able to override her parental rights with respect to her remaining minor children, but the court found that “Calgaro has not established a reasonable expectation that any of her three minor children will be deemed emancipated by the defendants.”

 

Calgaro is represented by the Thomas More Society, a religious freedom litigation group, which is trying to use this case to establish the rights of parents, presenting two questions to the Supreme Court: first, whether parents’ Due Process rights to custody and control of their minor children “apply to local governments and medical providers” such that these entities cannot invade “parental rights, responsibilities or duties over their minor children’s welfare, education and medical care decisions without a court order;” and, second, in a rather long and convoluted question, whether the Minnesota statute defining emancipation is unconstitutional to the extent that it might be construed to authorize entities in the position of the defendants to do the things they did in this case.

 

Although the Petition does not stage this case as a religious free exercise case, the advocacy of Thomas More Society suggests that religious objections to transgender identity and transitional care underlie its interest in the case, and that if the Court were to grant the Petition, many religious organizations would be among those arguing that a parent should be able to prevent schools, government agencies, and health-care providers from assistant minors who identify as transgender from effectively freeing themselves from parental control as they seek to live in the gender with which they identify.

 

The National Center for Lesbian Rights provided legal representation to E.J.K. in the lower courts, and continues to represent E.J.K. as one of the named respondents in this Petition.

 

The odds against this Petition being granted are long, but the Court’s recent trend of taking an expansive view of religious free exercise rights suggests that it would not be totally surprising were the Court to take this case for review.

New Jersey Court Grants Name Change to Trans Teen in Case of “First Impression”

Posted on: July 1st, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

In what the court characterized as a matter of “first impression in this state,” New Jersey Superior Court Judge Marcia Silva granted a transgender teenager a change of name from Veronica to Trevor on March 17. “At the parties’ request,” wrote Judge Silva, “this court has used the parties’ real names.  It was also Trevor’s desire that his name be used in this opinion.”  The opinion was approved for publication on June 28.  The case is Sacklow v. Betts, 2017 N.J. Super. LEXIS 85, 2017 WL 2797437 (Middlesex County).

While this may have been a case of first impression in New Jersey in terms of published court opinions, Trevor is not the first transgender minor to get a court-approved name change. Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy from Virginia whose lawsuit against his school district to gain appropriate restroom access is still pending before the federal appeals court in Richmond even though he recently graduated from Gloucester County High School, received a legal name change, as have some other transgender teens who are involved in litigation against their schools.

The case was originally contested. Trevor’s parents were divorced in 2011 and have joint custody, although Trevor lives with his mother, Janet Sacklow.  His father, Richard Betts, consented to Trevor beginning hormone treatments in 2014, first to suppress menstruation and then, in 2016, testosterone to begin masculinizing his body.  However, Richard was opposed to the name change.  Janet filed the petition seeking the name change on Trevor’s behalf on September 12, 2016, naming Richard as the defendant.  He did not drop his opposition until after he heard Trevor testify during a hearing on March 7.

The biggest issue for Judge Silva was whether the court had any judgment to exercise in this case once the consent of both parents had been obtained. When an adult petitions for a name change, New Jersey law dictates that the court should grant the change unless there is some public interest in denying it, usually based on a finding that it is being done to perpetrate a fraud on creditors or to avoid criminal prosecution.  Unless one of those complicating factors is present, the court is normally not required to make any finding as to whether the name change is in the best interest of the applicant.

A quarter-century ago, in the case of Matter of Eck, 245 N.J. Super. 220 (App. Div. 1991), a New Jersey trial judge refused to grant a transgender adult’s petition for a name change, holding that “it is inherently fraudulent for a person who is physically a male to assume an obviously ‘female’ name for the sole purpose of representing himself to future employers and society as a female.” The Appellate Division reversed this ruling, stating that “a person has a right to a name change whether he or she has undergone or intends to undergo a sex change through surgery, has received hormonal injections to induce physical change, is a transvestite, or simply wants to change from a traditional ‘male’ first name to one traditionally ‘female’ or vice versa.”  In other words, where an adult is concerned, the court has limited discretion to deny a name change, and in New Jersey, at least since 1991, it has been established that a name change to accord with gender identity is not deemed fraudulent as such.

The issue for minors is different, Judge Silva explained. There is a statute governing name changes for minors that has some factual inquiries as prerequisites similar to those governing adults, which did not seem to apply in Trevor’s case.  “It is uncontested,” wrote Silva, “that Trevor is not doing this with the purpose to defraud creditors or avoid criminal prosecution nor has Trevor ever been involved with the criminal justice system.”

But most name change petitions for minors involve situations where the parents are divorcing and the mother, who may have primary residential custody, is planning to assume her maiden name and wants her child to have the same last name as her. In such cases, where the father may be opposed, the court has to referee the situation by figuring out whether it is in the child’s best interest for a change of surname, and in a 1995 case a New Jersey court set out a list of factors to consider in such a case.  Of course, the decision to change a given name to reflect gender identity presents different issues, but Judge Silva concluded that in light of the court’s role as a guardian of the interests of children (referred to in the law as parens patriae) “the best interest of the child standard should apply,” while acknowledging that although the cases involving surnames “provide some guidance to this court, they do not fully address whether the proposed name change is in Trevor’s best interest.”

Judge Silva specified the following factors that she would consider in Trevor’s case: his age, how long he has used the name Trevor, “any potential anxiety, embarrassment or discomfort that may result from the child having a name he or she believes does not match his or her outward appearance and gender identity,” the history of Trevor’s medical or mental health counseling, the name by which he is known in his family, school and community, his preference and motivation for seeking the name change, and whether his parents have given consent.

In this case, the court concluded that all these factors supported a finding that it was in Trevor’s best interest to approve the name change. Trevor had been considered a “quintessential tomboy” by his parents due to his lack of interest in typical girl activities as a youth, and they noticed when he entered the sixth grade “a change in his behavior” that led them to seek counseling for him, first with a child study team at school and then with a clinical social worker.  Ultimately Trevor announced his male gender identity to his parents and his desire to be called Trevor.  His gender dysphoria was diagnosed by a psychologist who continues to work with him through his transition.  Trevor testified that “the only people that still call him Veronica are his father, his stepmother and step-siblings” and that “he feels that the name [Trevor] better represents who he is and the gender with which he identifies.”

While noting the “constant changes that have occurred in the legal landscape as it relates to gender identity, sexual orientation and similar issues,” Silva wrote, “the issue of whether a transgender minor child should be permitted to change his or her name to better match his or her gender identity is a novel one for this court.” She pointed out that if Trevor had waited until his 18th birthday, the issue would be simpler.  Parental approval would not be required.  “However, children are unable to make such decisions on their own unless they have been emancipated.”

Judge Silva observed that the legislature has declared that the state “has a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth” and, she wrote, “recognizing the importance of a name change is one of the ways to help protect the well-being of a transgender minor child. The name change allows the transgender minor child to begin to fully transition into their chosen gender and possibly prevent them from facing harassment and embarrassment from being forced to use a legal name that may no longer match his or her gender identity.”

One practical reason why Trevor wanted the change now was because, as he was about to turn 17, he would be applying for a driver’s license and applying to colleges. He was planning this summer to travel to China and would be getting a passport.  It was important, now that he is living as a boy, for him to be able to get these official documents with an appropriate name matching his identity, and a legal name change was needed to use this name on official documents.  Judge Silva counted this motivation in favor of granting the application.

The judge concluded, “Trevor has undergone hormone therapy and presents as a young man with facial hair, a muscular build, a head full of male-textured hair, and a deeper voice. To force him to legally keep the feminine name ‘Veronica’ would not be in his best interest.  Therefore, plaintiff’s motion to legally change Veronica’s name to Trevor is granted.”  Trevor was not seeking to change his surname, and will henceforth be known as Trevor Adam Betts.

Often transgender people seek an exemption from the legal requirement that court-ordered name changes be published in a newspaper of public record, but Trevor was not seeking such an exemption.   “Given the parties’ request that their real names be used in this decision, and the fact that Trevor is the subject of a documentary, this court does not find it necessary to protect his identity and thus will order plaintiff to comply with the publication and filing requirements.”

Trevor and his mother were represented in this proceeding by Jennifer Weisberg Millner of the firm Fox Rothschild LLP.