Far more rapidly than was anticipated, the U.S. Supreme Court has responded to an effort by a conservative public-interest group to uphold a federal court ruling in December that knelled the end of California public schools’ parental exclusion policy.
While a final decision has not been made, the tea leaves at the bottom of cup are pointing toward allowing parents to be privy to how their children are conducting themselves in public when their parents are not around.
Several of California’s highest-ranking political officials challenged the December 22, 2025 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Benitez that held schools, school districts and school faculty cannot prevent parents from knowing if their children are assuming at school a gender different from their biological sex or the gender they were identity as being at birth.
Judge Benitez’s decision came in a case, Mirabella et al v Olson et al, in which Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West, two teachers in the Escondido Unified School District challenged that district’s policy, which required teachers to accommodate students who represented themselves as being of a different gender than the one identified for them by medical professionals and their parents at birth and memorialized in their birth certificates while they were in a classroom setting and at school generally, including referring to them by the names those students choose for themselves but reverting to their given names and making no mention of the gender transition the students have made when interacting with the student’s parents. Mirabelli and West were joined in their suit by two other anonymous teachers from the Escondido School District and by two families in which the parents were kept uninformed by the gender transitioning of their children. They were represented by the San Diego County-based law firm of LiMandri & Jonna and the Thomas More Society, a Roman Catholic nonprofit legal organization/public interest law firm.
In rendering his decision, Benitez traversed the state’s contention that students’ privacy rights outweighed parents’ entitlement to participating in the upbringing of their children and wrote that as a consequence of parental exclusion policies in general and the parental exclusion policy in place in the Escondido Union School District, “The state purposefully interferes with a parent’s access to meaningful information about their child’s gender identity choices. It is a grave mistake to deprive parents of information about their child’s gender at school.”
Judge Benitez noted that the basis for preventing parents from learning about their children assumption of a variant gender identity was that parents of students exploring or assuming such a transition have malintent toward their children. “The problem,” Benitez wrote, “is that the parent exclusion policies seem to presume that it is the parents that will be the harassers from whom students need to be protected.” Judge Benitiez said seeking to protect students was admirable, but that the state cannot make a blanket assumption that parents are a danger to their own children.
Judge Benitez characterized as “laudable” the efforts by state officials to support and protect transgender students, but that achieving those goals cannot entail disregarding the constitutional rights of others, such as the First Amendment rights reserved for Mirabelli and West and the fundamental rights affirmed in the Supreme Court precedents of Parham v. J.R. and the Mahmoud v. Taylor establishing the parent-child relationship as older and more fundamental than the rights of the state and that parents rather than school administrators hold the “high duty” to recognize symptoms of illness or distress in their children.
“The state defendants are, in essence, asking this court to limit, and restrict a common-sense and legally sound description by the United States Supreme Court of parental rights,” Benitez wrote. “That, this Court will not do.”
According to Judge Benitez, the state and the California Department of Education, through its imposition of the principle of parental exclusion was engaging a what he termed a “trifecta of harm.” This extended to damaging children by cutting them off from parental support, hurting parents by usurping their rights to engage in decision-making pertaining to their offspring and harming teachers by compelling them to lie.
Judge Benitez said parents are entitled under the law to exercise oversight over their child’s medical treatment and he analogized withholding from parents information about their children’s assumed gender identity to educators failing to share students’ physical injuries or other health-related concerns with parents.
“When it comes to a student’s change in gender identity, California state policymakers apparently do not trust parents to do the right thing for their child,” Judge Benitez stated.
The California Attorney General’s Office, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and members of the State Board of Education testified at trial that parental exclusion on balance was more beneficial than disclosing to parents information about their children’s efforts toward gender transition because it would provide a “safer environment” for those students. The state defendants maintained they had a duty to provide safe learning conditions for students and that “outing” students to their parents could lead to bullying, harassment and both physical, psychological and emotional abuse. Students, despite not having attained the age of majority under both state and federal law, the defendants argued, had privacy rights and were entitled to “bodily autonomy.” Schools and school districts were bound to provide students with those protections and guarantees, according to the defendants.
The defendants disputed that honoring a student’s choice of gender identity, name or pronoun constituted medical treatment but was a social nicety or courtesy that grew out of basic human decency.
According to Judge Benitez, the defendants were unable to cogently demonstrate how perpetuating parents’ ignorance about their children’s assumption of an altered gender represented a “narrowly tailored solution to a compelling state interest.”
“Simply because the decision of a parent is not agreeable to a child or because it involves risks does not automatically transfer the power to make that decision from the parents to some agency or officer of the state,” Judge Benitez stated, concluding, “Disagreement is not abuse, and the court so finds.”
The decision in Mirabelli et al. v. Olson et al., which was litigated in federal court, marks a significant deviation from the tenor of decisions reached in cases dealing with the same topic in state court.
Federal law supersedes state law. According to the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, (Article VI, Clause 2), federal laws made pursuant to the Constitution are the “supreme law of the land, “supreme law of the land,” such that if a state law conflicts with a feeral law, federal law will override the state law, a concept referred to as preemption. In Mirabelli et al. v. Olson et al., Judge Benitez ruled that the parental exclusion policy in place at the Escondido Union School District, which is virtually indistinguishable from policies in hundreds of other school districts in California, violated the 14th Amendment’s substantive due process clause and the First Amendment rights of religious parents and teachers.
Judge Benitez’s order grants summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs and issues a permanent injunction. This effectively prevents schools or school districts from stopping teachers from disclosing to parents the gender identity their children have adopted in a school or classroom setting or in any way punishing those teachers for doing so. It prevents schools from requiring that teachers or educators lie to parents.
The ruling applies to all public-school districts in California, eradicating the parental exclusion policies now in place in hundreds of school districts throughout California.
Judge Benitez’s ruling in Mirabelli et al. v. Olson et al. carries with it not just the possibility but the likelihood that it will undo several decisions in state court and parallel policies, including the in San Bernardino County Superior Court involving the Chino Valley Unified School District’s parental notification policy.
Judge Benitz’s ruling clashed with the policy recommended to schools by the State of California, the California Superintendent of Schools, the California Board of Education and the California Department of Education.
Throughout California, fewer than a dozen of the 1,015 school districts statewide did not adhere to that policy. One district which led the way in defying the state trend was the Chino Valley Unified School District, where, in July 2023 the school board on a 4-to-1 vote passed a parental notification policy requiring that teachers inform the parents of any students who on campus assumed a gender identity at odds with their biologic gender as recorded on their birth statistic and extrapolated into the student’s academic file.
Prior to the Chino School Board adopting the policy, it garnered the opposition of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who vowed to take action against the district if it pushed forward with the parental notification mandate. Indeed, the following month, as the 2023-24 school year was beginning, Bonta, in hsicapacity as California Attorney General, filed suit in San Bernardino County Superior Court to block the district from actuating the policy. The court issued a stay on the implementation of the policy while the matter was considered and ultimately issued a ruling in favor of Bonta and against the district, but carved out a lone path for the district to pursue its intended parental notification by ruling that if a student’s official academic records and transcripts were altered at the student’s request, his or her parents had a right to be informed about any such change.
The Chino Valley Unified School District Board responded by adopting a policy that called for alerting parents if students on their own initiative made any alterations of their official school records.
The California legislature then passed and Governor Gavin Newsom on July 15, 2024 signed into law AB 1955, prohibiting schools from making a practice of notifying parents if their child assumes a gender different from the one assigned him or her at birth without the child’s permission. As soon as Governor Newsom’s signature was dry, the Chino Valley Unified School District and parents Oscar Avila, Monica Botts, Jason Craig, Kristi Hays, Cole Mann, Victor Romero, Gheorghe Rosca, Jr. and Leslie Sawyer, represented by attorney Emily Ray of the Austin, Texas-based Liberty Justice Center, sued Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in an effort to prevent the enforcement of AB 1955.
While those issues were being hashed out in state court, similar questions were being litigated in the federal court in the form of the Mirabelli v. Olson case.
In the aftermath of Judge Benitez’s ruling, Bonta, Thurmond, California State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond and California State Board of Education Board of ducation members Cynthia Glover Woods, Francisco cobedo, Brenda Lewis, James J. McQuillen, Sharon Olken, riela Orozco Gonzalez, Kim Pattillo Brownson, Haydee R riguez, Alison Yoshimoto-Towery and Vanessa Ejike p ti ioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit f r n emergency stay of Judge Benitez’s ruling in the Mirabelli v. Olson case to prevent any of California’s s school districts from proceeding with the practice of parental notification.
In the emergency motion, which was drafted by Bonta, the California Attorney General maintains Judge Benitez’s interpretation of federal constitutional issues is erroneous and in glaring conflict with the State of California’s anti-discrimination and privacy laws. The State of California will prevail in its appeal of Judge Benitez’s ruling, and he asked the Ninth Circuit to intervene in the meantime to avert the serious risk that teachers and schools will begin disclosing sensitive information about students’ gender identities, which cannot be undone after the fact. According to Bonta, students up and down the state who have chosen to express their true selves did so under the belief that the schools would remain true to their policy of confidentiality and protecting them as is codified in the state’s currently existing statutes and laws.
“Outing transgender students to their parents before they are ready threatens severe mental and emotional anguish, depression, and in extreme cases, even suicide,” Bonta asserted in the emergency motion. Averting the harm that lesbian, bisexual, gay, transsexual and queer students will sustain as a consequence of Judge Benitez’s ruling should prevail over parents’ rights, according to the state attorney general. The Ninth Circuit on January 5 granted the emergency motion for a stay, pending the state’s appeal of the ruling.
Thereafter, the Thomas More Society filed a motion seeking an “en banc” reconsideration of the stay order with the full Ninth Circuit and simultaneously pursued review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thomas Brejcha, Peter Breen and Christopher Galiardo of the Thomas More Society’s Chicago office and Michael McHale of the Thomas More Society’s Omaha office, along with attorneys Paul Jonna, Charles Limandri and Jeffrey Trissell of the law firm Limandri & Jonna in Rancho Santa Fe filed an emergency application to vacate the interlocutory stay order issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit lodged specifically “to the Honorable Elena Kagan, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and Circuit Justice for the Ninth Circuit.”
Justice Kagan is one of only three of the Supereme Court’s members who are not Catholic. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Amy Coney Barrett are all Catholic.
In the request for the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the Ninth Circuit’s interlocutory order staying the Judge Benitez’s ruling, Brejcha, Breen, Galiardo, McHale, Jonna, Limandri and Trissell wrote, “A social transition encompasses behaving—in all regards—as a member of the opposite sex. That includes adopting a new name and pronouns, adopting a new opposite-sex presentation (hair, clothes, makeup), and beginning to use sex-segregated facilities and participating in sex segregated activities as a member of the opposite sex. Examining the nation’s historical traditions, several courts have held that ‘parents retain a constitutionally protected right to guide their own children on matters of identity, including the decision to adopt or reject various gender norms and behaviors,’ and ‘to have a say in what a minor child is called and by what pronouns they are referred.” Whether viewed under the traditional understanding of in loco parentis [in the place of a parent], or a more modern understanding, this right reaches into the schools. Parents only delegate authority over their children ‘under circumstances’ when they ‘cannot protect, guide, and discipline them.’ They do not delegate authority to expand those circumstances and cut them out. More, parents only relinquish authority needed for the school to carry out its ‘educational mission,’—they do not delegate the authority to make decisions regarding whether their child is a boy or a girl.”
Justice Elena Kagan agreed to provide an expeditious decision with regard to the issues raised in the case, and gave Bonta until next Wednesday, January 21, to respond.
Thus, it appears the request to reinstate Judge Benitez’ December 22 ruling that California’s parental exclusion policies are unconstitutional and that parents cannot be deprived of information that may affect their child’s wellbeing and health will potentially be settled by the end of the month.