When runaway minors ask for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions to resemble the opposite sex, Washington state not only refers them for potentially irreversible treatment but also does not require parental notification and consent, hides their "location and condition" and unilaterally decides "reunification" conditions, a lawsuit alleges.

According to the historically overturned 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, parents cannot challenge the Evergreen State's laws in court because they weren't harmed.

A wide coalition of parents of would-be and actual runaway children with gender confusion, parental rights, religious liberty and gay-rights groups, 16 states and even a transgender child psychologist, are now backing America First Legal's petition to the Supreme Court in friend-of-the-court briefs, most filed Tuesday, to reinstate AFL's legal challenge.

Washington first drew alarm three years ago as legislation moved forward to create a "gender-affirming care" exception to parental notification for runaway children. AFL unsuccessfully sued to block the "state-sanctioned kidnapping" after it became law.

The group, founded by President Trump's influential adviser Stephen Miller, asked the high court to heed two warnings by justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch that lower courts were avoiding "contentious constitutional questions" on parental rights in state-facilitated gender transitions by denying legal standing.

Its sibling America First Policy Institute is representing Erin Lee, who says her daughter adopted a new gender identity only "after being lured to an after-school meeting by one of her teachers," similar to a Colorado middle school that invited all students on four consecutive days to lunchtime LGBTQ discussions with a teacher.

The justices' second warning was prompted by SCOTUS denying Lee's petition to hold another Colorado school district liable for letting the girl's teacher invite the 12-year-old to a 90-minute lecture on gender identity, which even the 10th Circuit portrayed as indoctrination.

First Liberty Institute is representing Abigail Martinez, who lost her gender-confused daughter to suicide after California removed the girl from her home and put her on cross-sex hormones without counseling. Martinez has widely shared the troubling story for four years.

The 9th Circuit, which also oversees California, now requires parents to wait until "it may be too late" to challenge a law that "clearly infringes their constitutional rights," making those rights "paper promises" in the process, the brief says.

SCOTUS is already considering whether to reverse the 9th Circuit's block on a district judge's permanent injunction against California's so-called gender secrecy policies that require school districts to hide gender identity from parents. Several groups that filed in that case also filed in AFL's Washington challenge.

"Our Constitution places the burden on States to respect fundamental rights, not on citizens to claw back the right to parent their own children," said 16 Republican attorneys general led by Idaho's Raul Labrador and Florida's James Uthmeier.

By deeming the harms to AFL's clients "self-inflicted and not sufficiently immediate or certain," the 9th Circuit took such a "crabbed" view of standing that it "obliterated" parental rights, they said. "Every day" parents have "less authority over the custody and care of their children" than before Washington changed the law, which "looms over every interaction."

While the high court has eschewed challenges to school districts' secret social transitions of students, "this petition presents a cleaner vehicle … to confirm the primacy of parental rights over a state’s preference for gender ideology," in part because Washington explicitly "authorizes medical interventions without parental consent," the AGs said.

The LGB Courage Coalition, founded by pediatric gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed, filed a brief with parents Jodie and David Holman, who blame Washington laws for their mentally ill 15-year-old having gone missing since November, and Ashly Wallace, whose daughter feigned homelessness and used welfare "to escape a family who refused to treat her as a male."

"Child welfare systems were designed to protect abused and homeless children, not to remove troubled children from their own parents who seek to address their minor child’s underlying mental health issues rather than default to encouraging that child to undergo life-altering measures to change their appearance," says the brief.

Washington created an interlocking web of laws that "make it nearly impossible for parents to direct the upbringing of their children … to grow up whole," including parent-overruling Medicaid and laws letting minors from age 13 get mental health treatment without parental consent and requiring insurers to hide their gender-affirming care from policyholders, they said.

Transgender psychologist Erica Anderson, who has seen "hundreds" of children for gender confusion and transitioned "many" but is an outspoken critic of the field's lax standards, filed a brief on the importance of parental involvement in transition procedures, represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and California Justice Project.

In the absence of SCOTUS intervention, cases nationwide challenging secret, in-school transitions are "splitting the lower courts in all sorts of directions," with some "evading the merits" through standing or a "shocks the conscience" standard and others "mischaracterizing the issue as merely a matter of 'curriculum,'" the brief says.

The result has been catastrophic for gender-confused children, with attempted suicides, severe emotional decline, physical harm and even sex trafficking, and Washington's system is even worse because it actively hides children from their parents, Anderson said.

"Children cannot even receive a Tylenol without parental consent; facilitating a secret gender transition is far more serious, particularly when the parent does not even know the location of or any information about their child’s well-being," the brief says.