A group of Washington parents want the chance to sue their state over a law they say threatens how they raise their own kids. There’s just one problem, which is that none of them can point to a moment when the law actually harmed them. That gap, whether a parent has to wait for harm to arrive before going to court, is what the Supreme Court has agreed to decide in International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson.

The dispute traces back to 2023, when Washington’s legislature changed how the state handles runaway teenagers who show up at licensed youth shelters seeking what the law calls “protected health care services,” a category that includes gender-affirming treatment and reproductive health care. Under the old rule, a shelter had to contact a runaway’s parents within three days, sooner if possible, and tell them where their child was and how they were doing. Under the new law, if a minor at the shelter is seeking one of those protected services, the shelter instead reports to Washington’s child welfare agency, which then makes a good faith attempt to reach the parents and offers voluntary counseling aimed at reuniting the family. Washington also has a decades-old law letting teens 13 and older get outpatient mental health treatment without a parent’s sign-off.

Five sets of parents, along with two advocacy groups, sued to strike down these laws. Their children show signs of gender dysphoria, a mismatch between the sex someone is assigned at birth and the gender they identify with, and the parents don’t want to affirm that identity. But none of their kids has actually run away to a licensed shelter and received gender-affirming care without parental consent. The parents argue that living under the threat of that outcome has already changed how they raise their children, and that a real risk exists it could still happen. A federal district court, and then a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit, disagreed that any of this was enough to get into court, and dismissed the case for lack of standing.

Standing is the constitutional gatekeeping doctrine that decides who is allowed to sue in federal court in the first place. Article III of the Constitution limits federal courts to actual “cases and controversies,” which the Supreme Court has long read to mean a plaintiff needs a concrete injury that has already happened or is genuinely about to. In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the Court held that vague “someday” fears, without any specifics about when or how they’ll materialize, don’t cut it. In Clapper v. Amnesty International USA (2013), the Court added that people can’t create standing by scaring themselves into taking precautions against a harm that isn’t actually close to happening.

That’s the exact fight here. Washington argues the parents’ claims rest on what the Ninth Circuit called “an enormity of ifs and shoulds”: for the law to ever touch these families, a child would first need to identify as transgender, then seek gender-affirming care, then run away, then reach a licensed shelter, then decline to share contact information, then accept a referral, and finally receive care without the parents’ knowledge. The state says that’s the kind of speculative chain that could or could not happen, dependent on choices made by the child and by strangers, that Clapper forbids from being brought to Court. It also argues the parents’ own changes in behavior, like a mother easing up on discipline out of fear her child might run away, are self-inflicted rather than caused by anything the law actually requires of them.

The parents counter that they shouldn’t have to wait for the worst to happen, because the law was written to route around them in the first place. They point to floor speeches from the bill’s own sponsors describing the legislation as necessary because some families won’t affirm a child’s gender identity, and argue that history shows the law effectively targets non-affirming parents like themselves. Leaning on a 2025 case called Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA, they argue that when a policy deliberately targets you, even one that doesn’t regulate you directly, you don’t have to wait for a worst-case scenario before suing.

Listen for the justices asking exactly where the line sits between a fear that’s concrete enough to sue over and one that’s still too speculative, especially when the missing link in the chain is a child’s own independent choice. Watch too for questions about what it really means to be the “object” of a law, and whether debate about a bill’s motives can turn parents into the targets of a law that, technically, regulates shelters and a state agency rather than parents. A related thread runs through Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), which suggested that especially severe potential harms might justify a lower bar for how likely the harm needs to be before it can be brought to Court. The parents lean on that idea, but the state says it’s being read out of context. Expect some justices to also ask what a ruling here would mean for the many similar disputes moving through lower courts involving parents, minors, and gender-identity policies in schools.

It’s worth being precise about what’s actually before the Court. This case is not about whether Washington’s laws are constitutional, whether parents have a right to be notified, or whether the state can offer minors health services without parental consent. Those bigger questions stay parked in the lower courts unless and until the parents clear the current hurdle on whether they can sue at all. The only thing the justices will decide is whether these parents get a chance to litigate those questions at all.

For teenagers, this case is unusual. It is a technical rule about who gets to sue, but it is related to some of the most personally loaded issues in our lives, including family conflict, gender identity, and how much say parents versus the state have over decisions affecting minors. However the Court rules on standing, the decision will certainly shape how future lawsuits over school gender policies and minors’ health care rights get off the ground, including some that could eventually involve people our age directly.