Supreme Court backs parents in school gender policy case

A 9th Circuit panel should not have lifted a permanent injunction granted by a federal judge to parents who claimed a California policy preventing schools from telling them about their children’s efforts to engage in gender transitioning violated their rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a divided U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

The plaintiffs in the case include both parents and teachers who objected to two policies adopted by public schools in California. The first policy prevents schools from telling parents about their children’s efforts to engage in gender transitioning at school unless the children consent to parental notification. The second policy requires schools to use children’s preferred names and pronouns regardless of their parents’ wishes.

In 2023, two teachers sued in federal court seeking exemptions from their school district’s policies regarding student gender. The school district responded by arguing the gender policies were mandated state law, as interpreted by the California attorney general and state department of education.

The teachers thereupon added state officials as defendants. Further, parents of California schoolchildren joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs thereafter sought class-wide relief. The district court certified a class with separate subclasses for parents and teachers. The lower court subsequently granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment.

A permanent injunction entered by the lower court: (1) prohibited the school defendants from “misleading” parents about their children’s gender presentation at school and their social transitioning efforts; (2) required the schools to follow parents’ directions regarding their children’s names and pronouns; and (3) directed the schools to provide notice of the rights protected by the injunction in state-created or approved instructional materials.

A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals lifted the injunction, expressing concerns the lower court had improperly granted class certification and that the permanent injunction was overly broad. Further, the panel concluded the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor was not controlling on the question of whether the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claims. In Mahmoud, the court held that under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, public schools must provide notice and allow parents to opt their children out of curriculum that includes LGBTQ+-themed books.

The Supreme Court took up the case on the plaintiffs’ application to vacate the 9th Circuit’s interlocutory stay order. In a per curiam opinion, a majority of the Supreme Court reversed with respect to the plaintiff parents, concluding the parents were entitled to a permanent injunction based upon a showing of irreparable harm and a likelihood of success on the merits.

Click here to read the full text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s March 2 decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta.

• “California’s policies will likely not survive the strict scrutiny that Mahmoud demands. The State argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy. But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents. California’s policies also appear to fail the narrow-tailoring requirement. The State’s interest in safety could be served by a policy that allows religious exemptions while precluding gender-identity disclosure to parents who would engage in abuse. For these reasons, the parents who object to the California policies on free exercise grounds are likely to succeed on the merits.
  “The same is true for the subclass of parents who object to those policies on due process grounds. Under long-established precedent, parents — not the State — have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’ The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”
  — opinion of the court

• “California prohibits its public schools from informing parents of their child’s gender transition at school unless the child consents. The record in this case indicates that the State’s nondisclosure policy applies even if parents expressly ask for information about their child’s gender identification. One set of parents learned of their child’s transition at school only after the child attempted suicide. Strikingly, even after this tragic event, school administrators continued to withhold information about the student’s gender identification. California’s nondisclosure policy thus quite obviously excludes parents from highly important decisions about their child’s mental health, and is unlikely to satisfy heightened scrutiny. Our resolution of the parents’ likelihood of success on this claim is dictated by existing law.”
  — Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, concurring

• “Today’s decision shows, not for the first time, how our emergency docket can malfunction. A case raising novel legal questions and arousing strong views comes to this Court via an application about whether to stay a district court’s injunction pending appeal. The ordinary appellate process has barely started; only a district court has ruled on the case’s merits. The Court receives scant and, frankly, inadequate briefing about the legal issues in dispute. It does not hold oral argument or deliberate in conference, as regular procedures dictate. It considers the request on a short fuse — a matter of weeks. And then the Court grants relief by means of a terse, tonally dismissive ruling designed to conclusively resolve the dispute. The Court does all this even though the application of existing law to the case raises tricky questions, and so cries out for reflection and explanation. The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly.”
  — Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting