Catholic parents Joseph and Arlene Kutzko are fighting to regain custody of their teen daughter after she was removed over her gender transition.
Page B6From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 15 September 2026
THE PATTERN
DOJ sues third district this month over parental rights; parents in court still don't have their daughter.
As it ran on the front
The Justice Department filed its third lawsuit this month against a school district over transgender student policy, and if you squint it looks like consistency: Kansas City Public Schools on September 1st, accused of running a "Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students Internal Guidance Document" that let kids socially transition without telling their parents. A day later the department called it, proudly, a "first-of-its-kind lawsuit" — first-of-its-kind for the second time in two days, since the phrase describes the same Kansas filing both times. Did I say proudly? That's not the word. Repeated is the word. By September 4th a New Jersey district was accused of the identical thing, framed this time as defiance of the Supreme Court. Three suits, one month, one stated principle: parents deserve to know.
Credit where it's due — some districts got the message early. Santa Fe Public Schools rewrote its gender policy back on August 20th to require parental sign-off on any Gender Support Plan, which advocates for parental rights called a step in the right direction. A genuine fix, in other words — except it isn't, because Santa Fe can still lose federal funding anyway, since the policy on the books is still, on paper, an "active transgender policy." So compliance is not the shield anyone was promised. Call it incentive alignment, if you want the district to feel better about it.…
…(cont) Which brings us to Texas, and to Joseph and Arlene Kutzko, parents currently in family court trying to get their daughter back after she was removed over her gender transition — the transition their Catholic family says the school handled without telling them at all. This is the case that was supposed to prove the principle: parents who say they were shut out, now in court asking a judge to fix it.
Except a courtroom is not customer service. The Kutzkos are not being handed a settlement, or an apology, from the department that spent September building a legal theory on their exact complaint. They are litigating a custody case, alone, against a state process that does not care which lawsuit in Kansas inspired anyone's paperwork. The department got its third headline this month. The family got a docket number.
That's not nothing. It's just not what "parents deserve to know" bought the Kutzkos, and nobody at the department has said when, or whether, it will.
“They keep suing school districts over "parental rights" like it's a religion, three times this month alone, but the one actual family testing that principle in a Texas courtroom right now still doesn't have their kid back. The lawsuits are the show; the custody docket is the receipt. Follow the paperwork, not the press release — the press release doesn't have to win in family court.”
“Look, three lawsuits in one month isn't a pattern, it's — okay, it's a pattern, but it's a consistent pattern, which is different, that's called principle. The department is standing up for parents who were cut out of decisions about their own kids, that's not political, that's just — well, it's a little political. But the Kutzko case proves the system works, parents can go to court and — huh, they're still fighting for custody, they don't actually have her back yet. That's a state family court thing, that's not on us, we just filed the paperwork in Kansas.”
The receipts
· DOJ sues Kansas school district over transgender student policies from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· DOJ sues Kansas school district over ‘secret gender transitions’ in first-of-its-kind lawsuit from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Blue state school district accused of defying Supreme Court, hiding gender transitions from parents from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
· New Mexico public schools could lose federal funding over gender policy from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.