In a 6-3 landmark victory for parents on March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court, in a per curiam order (issued in the name of the Court), vacated the Ninth Circuit’s stay and reinstated U.S. district judge Roger Benitez’s December 2025 decision, a permanent injunction on behalf of a certified statewide class of parents.  The decision held that “secret gender transition policies in schools violate the religious liberty and due process rights of parents,” according to the Thomas More Society press release.

In short, in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the court sided with parents, saying California could no longer hide gender transitions from parents covered by the class injunction.  The Thomas More Society was behind the emergency application to restore the class-action injunction.  Their emergency application specifically asked the Court to vacate the Ninth Circuit order that had stayed a permanent injunction entered by the district court.

In May 2024, state superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond joined the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus to back AB 1955, the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act.  Introduced by Assembly member Chris Ward (D-San Diego), the law prevents mandatory disclosure of a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to parents without the child’s consent.

Specifically, AB 1955 bars schools from adopting parental notification rules that require administrators to tell parents when a student asks to be called by a different name or pronouns from his sex at birth or seeks access to opposite-sex sex-segregated programs or restrooms.  It also invalidates existing notification policies and reinforces confidentiality rules that, in practice, require school staff to withhold that information from parents.  Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law on July 15, 2024, and the law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.

The decision is one of the most significant parental rights rulings “in a generation,” according to the lawyers representing the parents.  The Court, according to the Thomas More Society, found in no uncertain terms that the “state cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”  The Court also found that concealing gender transition issues from parents “likely” violates parents’ rights under both the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

California’s consent framework has allowed — and in practice incentivized — school staff to withhold signs of gender dysphoria from parents, unless the student consented to disclosure.  For years, Attorney General Rob Bonta has framed parental notification rules as “forced outing” that threatens student privacy and well-being.

Reinforcing that position, Bonta issued a Jan. 10, 2024 “legal alert,” warning districts, boards, and superintendents against “forced gender identity disclosure policies” he said are detrimental to the “privacy, safety, and well-being” of transgender and gender-nonconforming students.  That legal alert reinforced an already contorted effort to justify concealing mental health red flags from parents in the name of student “safety.”  The Court held that California schools are “facilitat[ing] a degree of gender transitioning during school hours” and rejected the premise that “fit parents” must be sidelined.

As described by Andrea M. Picciotti-Bayer writing for the National Catholic Register, the record “puts a human face on what that secrecy regime actually meant in practice.”  She writes that two of the named plaintiff families “are devout Catholics whose faith shapes their understanding of sex and the human person,” and both allege “they were systematically cut out of their own children’s lives by the state.”

One family didn’t learn until far too late that their daughter had spent all of seventh grade presenting as a boy at school — using a different name and pronouns — while staff stayed silent even in parent-teacher conferences.  The parents found out only after she attempted suicide at the start of eighth grade.  And even after her hospitalization, educators at her new school continued to disregard the parents’ explicit directions.

The second family, says Picciotti-Bayer,

confronted their daughter’s school principal directly when they suspected the same was happening to their child. The principal’s response was candid and chilling: State law forbade the school from disclosing anything about a child’s gender identity without the child’s consent. Unable to afford private school, those parents had no choice but to transfer their daughter and place her in therapy.

The Court recognized that some children face abuse at home, addressing it directly by saying the injunction still allows the state to shield children from unfit parents through child abuse laws and custody intervention in appropriate cases.  The proper remedy for abuse, said the Court, should be targeted intervention, not a default institutionalized effort to conceal in the name of “safety” for the child.

Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Jackson, dissented and criticized the Court’s decision to step in the way it did.  She argued that the emergency docket invites rushed decision-making on novel, contested legal questions, with inadequate briefing and without the measured deliberation typical of the merits docket.  She also pointed to parallel litigation, suggesting the Court could take up similar issues through ordinary review rather than an emergency posture.  In effect, she seemed willing to leave distressed families facing what could be years of appellate delay.

Notably, the case began in 2023, when two teachers sued for an exemption from district policies.  The school district argued it was following state law as interpreted by the attorney general and the Department of Education, and parents later joined as plaintiffs.

The Court stressed that the injunction is not a blanket order for every California family, but applies only to the defined group of parents who object to the challenged policies or who seek religious exemptions.  However, even with that limitation, from a practical standpoint, the ruling will likely reduce the incentive to use the appeal as a pretext to delay or deny parental notice and involvement.  The appeal continues in the Ninth Circuit, and for now, California schools will be constrained to recognizing parents as the rightful guardians of their children’s welfare.

FreedomForever.us partners with a number of organizations such as the Paradox Institute, an organization that teaches about the differences in biological and psychological differences between males and females as well as the myths of gender affirming care. Freedom Forever also suggests the book, “A Practical Response to Gender Distress” written by Pamela Garfield-Jaeger.

Freedom Forever is an all-volunteer organization that focuses its energy and time on preserving the innocence and safety of children.

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*This article was originally published by American Thinker