In December 2024, Joseph and Arlene Kutzko — devout Catholics from Southborough, Massachusetts — lost custody of their 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, to the Department of Children and Families. Nearly two years later, they remain almost entirely cut off from her under a restraining order, while DCF, they say, supports a gender transition they refused to authorize. Their near-term fear is a specific one: that the state will start their daughter on testosterone. "The most important thing is to bring her back to our family," Joseph Kutzko said recently. "But a shorter term goal is to prevent them from giving her testosterone."
How does a family arrive at this place? According to the Kutzkos — and, strikingly, to the U.S. Department of Education's own summary of their complaint — the sequence began at Algonquin Regional High School, where their daughter attended after-school sessions her parents understood to be extra help for a math class. Those sessions, the parents allege, were actually gender-transition counseling. School staff, they say, began using a male name and male pronouns for her at school without informing them. And when the Kutzkos declined, on grounds of Catholic teaching, to affirm their daughter as a boy, a school counselor reported the family to DCF. The state then did what the school had begun: it took over.
Whatever a court ultimately finds about the individual actors, the structural claim deserves to be stated plainly, because it is the oldest claim in American constitutional law. In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the Supreme Court held that "the child is not the mere creature of the State." In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), it confirmed that parents — not officials — hold the right to direct a child's upbringing and education. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), it protected that right even against a state's sincere claims about what children need. And in Troxel v. Granville (2000), it reaffirmed "the presumption that fit parents act in the best interests of their children" — which means the government's mere disagreement with a fit parent's judgment is never a sufficient reason to override it.
The Kutzko case, as alleged, is not a hard application of those principles; it is their nightmare scenario. A public school did not merely teach something the parents found objectionable — schools do that, and the courts have largely given them latitude. A school is alleged to have counseling a child toward a contested identity intervention in secret, under an academic pretext, and then to have treated the parents' refusal to participate as evidence of unfitness. That inverts the constitutional order. Under *Troxel*, the question the state must answer is what harm the parents have caused — not what opinion they hold. A parent who says "I love my daughter, and I cannot in conscience call her my son" has adopted a position the state is free to disagree with and constitutionally forbidden to punish.
The state's defenders raise objections that deserve honest answers. Governor Maura Healey says the parents' account is "incorrect" and that DCF acted because of criminal charges, not gender identity. Court records reported by WBUR do complicate the family's narrative: Joseph Kutzko was arrested and pleaded not guilty to an assault charge, a judge referenced prior restraining orders, and Arlene Kutzko was charged with witness intimidation; the father denies the allegations, and filings reportedly provide for his charge to be dismissed in December if conditions are met. The superintendent, Gregory Martineau, "aggressively and unequivocally" denies any secret counseling. All of this belongs in the story — and none of it dissolves the principle at stake.
If this was truly an abuse case, the state should be able to prove it in open court with evidence untainted by the ideological dispute. What it may not do, consistent with the Constitution, is remove a child because her parents declined to adopt the state's preferred view of her identity — and then administer, through foster placement and state-assisted medical planning, the very intervention the parents refused. Protection of a child from harm is the state's highest duty. Conversion of that protective power into an instrument for pressing one side of America's most contested social debate is not protection; it is custody put to ideological work. The overlap here is precisely the problem: the same disagreement that allegedly triggered the report is the disagreement the state is now enforcing inside the child's own life, while her parents watch from behind a restraining order.
There is meaningful reason for public confidence in scrutiny: the U.S. Department of Education has opened an investigation into the district's conduct, including whether school personnel facilitated a social transition without parental knowledge under the cover of academic services. That a federal agency found the claims credible enough to investigate should caution against the reflexive dismissal the family has received from Massachusetts officials.
Parents' rights are not a conservative special pleading; they are the default setting of American constitutionalism, the reason Pierce could speak of children as belonging first to their families. The remedy this case demands is not exotic: transparency with parents before identity counseling occurs, evidentiary rigor before removal, and no ideological conditions placed on a child's return home. A state that claims its emergency powers were used for safety should welcome that standard. If Massachusetts cannot meet it, then Sophie Kutzko is not in state custody for her protection. She is there for her transition — and that, in any constitutional sense that matters, is the state taking a child from her parents.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
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Sources: MassLive, Boston Herald, WBUR, WCVB, New York Post, and U.S. Department of Education statements, September 2026. Contested allegations are attributed; nothing above should be read as a finding of fact against any party.
