The Kinsey Legacy and the Fight for Parental Rights - Mary McAlister
18 December 2025
With Mary McAlister
North America
Attorney Mary McAlister of the Child & Parental Rights Campaign joins Stella O'Malley to examine how US schools have been socially transitioning children without parental knowledge or consent, and how courts are beginning to push back. The conversation also traces the ideological roots of current sex education frameworks back to Alfred Kinsey's contested research. For Irish parents navigating revised RSE and SPHE curricula, and for anyone watching how parental rights are being tested and defended in court, this episode is directly instructive.
Mary McAlister is Senior Litigation Counsel at the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, a US nonprofit established in 2019 to represent families in court. In this episode she speaks with Stella O'Malley about a pattern documented across American schools: children being socially transitioned — given new names, new pronouns, and altered records — entirely without their parents' knowledge or consent. McAlister has spent nearly three decades in litigation, taking cases to Supreme Court level, and her account of how families discovered what was happening in their children's schools is both specific and legally grounded. The core legal question McAlister addresses is one of authority: who holds primary responsibility for a child's upbringing? In the United States, courts have increasingly answered in favour of parents. Schools have argued in some instances that concealing a child's new gender identity from parents was necessary to protect that child — a rationale McAlister contends inverts the proper legal relationship between state and family. She also describes cases where Child Protective Services was deployed against parents who declined to affirm their child's claimed gender identity, treating parental caution as a form of harm. The conversation reaches further back historically. McAlister worked closely with the late Dr Judith Reisman, whose research challenged the scientific and ethical foundations of Alfred Kinsey's mid-twentieth century work on human sexuality. Kinsey's data, they argued, was methodologically flawed and its collection ethically compromised, yet it became embedded in the frameworks underpinning modern sex education. McAlister now leads the Reisman Institute. Whatever weight one gives that historical critique, the broader question — how ideological assumptions become institutional defaults in education policy — is directly pertinent to how school curricula are designed and reviewed anywhere. Ireland operates under a distinct constitutional and legal framework, but the core tension is not unfamiliar. Article 42 of Bunreacht na hÉireann positions parents as the primary educators of their children, a principle Irish courts have repeatedly upheld. Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, exists to support and protect families, not to substitute state judgement for parental authority on matters of belief or upbringing. Ireland's revised RSE and SPHE guidelines, introduced into secondary schools in recent years, have generated real concern among parents who feel that public consultation lagged behind implementation. The question of what schools are required to disclose to parents when a child adopts a different name or pronoun in class remains, as of now, without a clear or settled policy answer in Ireland. McAlister's litigation experience, though rooted in US case law, maps onto arguments that Irish parents, school boards and policymakers are already encountering. The episode functions as a factual record of how these disputes have been framed and resolved in a jurisdiction where the courts have forced them into the open — producing rulings and institutional responses that offer a detailed preview of questions arriving here with increasing urgency.
