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‘This case centers on one of the most fundamental parental rights: the authority of parents to raise and guide their children according to their own beliefs and values’
The Supreme Court has been asked to consider a controversial case addressing California’s gender transition policy for public schools, which requires teachers to hide from parents whether their child is seeking a gender transition.
The high-profile case is being closely monitored by both liberal and conservative watchdogs. Dozens of conservative legal organizations and think tanks have filed briefs against the policy, arguing it grossly violates parental rights and teachers’ freedoms of speech and religion.
“California has reached a bizarre conclusion on this in that they make it illegal to transmit information to parents that their children are being transitioned by strangers,” Marc Wheat, general counsel for the group Advancing American Freedom, told The College Fix in an interview.
He said the Supreme Court, should it take up the case, “needs to be very clear that parents are the primary educators of their children and what they say goes.”
Supporters argue the policy is needed to protect students’ privacy and safety, arguing that “outing” a student to unsupportive parents could lead to harassment or domestic abuse.
“These protections exist for one reason: to keep students safe and ensure schools remain places where young people can learn and thrive without fear,” Equality California Executive Director Tony Hoang has told California news outlets.
The case, Mirabelli v. Bonta, filed in 2023, argues California’s policy requires “public schools to hide children’s expressed transgender status at school from their own parents.”
According to the petitioners, it’s a policy that kept them in the dark over their daughter’s transition until she attempted suicide.
In late December, a judge ruled in favor of the parents, and issued a permanent injunction against the policy. Judge Roger Benitez decided “it’s wrong to deprive parents of significant information that may affect their child’s well-being and health,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, adding the judge said the First Amendment protects teachers’ right to inform parents.
“Parents have a right to receive gender information and teachers have a right to provide to parents accurate information about a child’s gender identity,” Benitez wrote in his 52-page ruling.
He also cited the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have a right to remove their children from classroom activities harmful to their religious beliefs.
In January, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the district court’s injunction, prompting the plaintiffs to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court to reinstate the injunction.
Unlike Mahmoud, Mirabelli comes to the court on its emergency docket. This allows the case to proceed more quickly, and asks the court to merely pause the lower court’s ruling, rather than address the case on the merits. However, the parents ask the court to consider treating the case similar to Mahmoud and possibly consider the case on the merits before judgment.
The parental rights group Defending Education tracks school districts that hide transitions from parents. Among the 1,215 they currently list, nearly 600 are California schools.
Wheat told The College Fix that secret transition policies exist across America.
“The Supreme Court must be clear and strong in a decision because this is happening in probably every circuit,” he said. “We have filed in ten courts of appeals on the same kind of issue.”
“In Mahmoud, everyone was filing arguments in support of religious liberty,” he added. Now, he hopes the court will rule for broader parental rights protections.
“It does not matter if they have a religious objection or not,” he said. “Just because a child is born into a family without a faith tradition, doesn’t mean that child should be vulnerable to the whims of transgender ideologues on staff at a public school.”
Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund, which litigated the Mahmoud case, agrees with Wheat.
“This case centers on one of the most fundamental parental rights: the authority of parents to raise and guide their children according to their own beliefs and values,” he told The College Fix via email. “If the state can cut parents out here, no family is safe from similar government overreach.”
Since the parents in this case are religious, Rienzi said he believes the “strongest argument is the Free Exercise claim: under Mahmoud, the Constitution protects the right of religious parents to direct the upbringing of their own children, including when their children attend public schools.”
He also sees parallels between the two cases.
“Like in Mahmoud, California’s policy reflects the belief that parents should take a back seat to public schools on issues related to sex and gender,” he said.
The California attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment from The Fix.
Rienzi said he expects a decision from the Supreme Court on whether it will take up the case “in the coming weeks.”
In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Education on Jan. 28 found that the California Department of Education violated federal law by hiding students’ gender transitions from parents.
“While the Biden Administration turned a blind eye to this deprivation of parental rights and endorsed the irreversible harms done to children in the name of radical transgender ideology, the Trump Administration will fight relentlessly to end it,” stated U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a news release.
The feds are asking the California Department of Education to issue a “notice to all superintendents and administrators informing them that ‘gender support plans’ or other related documentation that is directly related to a student are considered education records under FERPA and are subject to parental inspection upon request.”
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