The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked a California law that prevented schools from automatically telling parents if their child identifies as transgender, handing a major victory to religious parents who argued the policy violated their rights.
The court issued a 6-3 emergency order on Monday, siding with conservative and religious parents who said the state’s student privacy rules kept them in the dark about their children’s gender identity at school. The ruling reinstates a lower-court injunction that had been put on hold.
According to the Associated Press, the case was brought by two sets of Catholic parents represented by the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based conservative legal group. The parents say California’s school policies allowed their children to socially transition at school — changing names, pronouns, and gender expression — without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
“The parents who assert a free exercise claim have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs,” the court’s unsigned majority opinion stated. “California’s policies violate those beliefs.”
The majority also noted that “gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health,” but said California’s rules “conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours.”
The court’s three liberal justices publicly dissented. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the case is still working through the lower courts and the high court had no need to step in so soon. “If nothing else, this Court owes it to a sovereign State to avoid throwing over its policies in a slapdash way,” Kagan wrote.
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas noted they would have gone further, granting additional relief to teachers who also wanted the restrictions lifted.
The case began when Escondido public school teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, both self-described devout Catholics, sued in 2023. They were later joined by parents in Pasadena and Clovis. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled in late December that California’s student privacy rules were unconstitutional, writing that “parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had put that ruling on hold — until now.
California’s attorneys had argued that the state does not categorically ban disclosure of a student’s gender identity to parents. They said the policies were designed to protect students who might face abuse or rejection at home, and that exceptions already exist to protect student well-being.
Religious liberty advocates celebrated the decision. “Parents’ fundamental right to raise their children according to their faith doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door,” said Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Paul M. Jonna, special counsel at Thomas More Society, called it “a watershed moment for parental rights in America.”
The ruling applies only to parents who have raised religious objections or sought religious exemptions — not to all California public school parents. The case continues to work its way through the lower courts, meaning the legal battle over California’s transgender student policies is far from over.
The Supreme Court has recently ruled in several related cases, including upholding state bans on gender-identity-related healthcare for minors and appearing to lean toward allowing states to ban transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams. The President Trump administration has also weighed in, finding in January that California’s policies violated parents’ rights to access their children’s education records, and the Justice Department has sued over transgender athlete policies in other states.
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