The Supreme Court sided with parents Monday in a legal fight over California’s requirement public school teachers keep gender transitions secret from the students’ parents.
In a per curiam decision — one unsigned but issued by the court — the majority of the justices said the parents are likely to prevail on their arguments that California’s rule interferes with the parents’ religious rights.
Under a school district policy and later a state law, teachers were required to keep a student’s gender transition in their classrooms, including the use of different names and pronouns, from parents.
The justices’ Monday order also noted that the parents have a viable claim that the law violated their due process rights.
“Under long established precedent, parents — not the State — have primary authority with respect to ’the upbringing and education of children,’” the order read.
The lawsuit began in 2023 when teachers sued their school district over their objection to being required to keep gender transitioning information from parents. Parents later joined the lawsuit and a lower court certified a class action challenging the policy.
In the class-action case, the judge divided the parents and teachers into subclasses, including those with religious objections.
The district court sided with the plaintiffs and issued a permanent injunction banning schools from misleading parents about their child’s gender transitioning efforts.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, overturned the injunction, finding procedural faults with the class certification.
The parents took the case to the justices, who sided with them on Monday — at least for now. The move reinstates the district court’s injunction, telling schools they cannot mislead parents.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, though, would have denied the request.
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, noting the record was rushed and that the court’s emergency docket should not have intervened at the injunction stage, allowing the case more time to develop in lower courts.
“The Court receives scant and, frankly, inadequate briefing about the legal issues in this 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,” they argued. “The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. would have sided with both the parents and teachers, not just the parents.
Some of the parents involved in the lawsuit noted they had to put their daughters into therapy after switching schools over hidden transitions where the daughters identified as boys.
One of the girls tried to commit suicide and received mental health treatment.
