Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.
Parents have the right to know about their child’s gender identity at school, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an emergency decision Monday.
The 6-3 decision by the conservative majority found parents were likely to prevail in a lawsuit seeking to overturn a California law that required teachers to use students’ preferred names and pronouns at school and that barred them from disclosing students’ gender identity to parents without the students’ consent.
The decision was notable because the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to take up similar cases that had worked their way through the courts. The case touches on hotly contested issues about the role of schools in children’s lives and how the law distinguishes between parents’ rights and children’s rights.
The majority invoked Mahmoud v. Taylor, a decision last year that found parents have the right to opt their children out of lessons that violate their religious beliefs. California’s law is unlikely to survive the strict scrutiny requirements imposed by Mahmoud, the court wrote.
“Indeed, the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights here — unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition — is greater than the introduction of LGBTQ storybooks we considered sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny in Mahmoud,” the court wrote.
Going beyond just the question of religious rights, the court also found that California’s law likely violates parents’ due process rights to direct their children’s upbringing.
“Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California’s policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours,” the decision stated. “These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Elana Kagan said the court should have allowed the case to get a more thorough airing in the lower courts — or taken up one of the numerous cases that has been argued more extensively, including a similar one out of Massachusetts.
The case, Kagan wrote, “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.”
Kagan also noted that the court last year refused to even consider the due process rights of parents who supported their children’s gender transition in its 2024 U.S. v. Skrmetti decision, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors.
The lawsuit in California originally was brought by Catholic teachers who said the law impinged on their free speech and religious liberty rights. Later, parents who said the law blocked them from making important decisions about their children’s health and upbringing joined the lawsuit.
A U.S. District Court judge sided with the teachers and parents, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit put that decision on hold, leaving California’s law in place while the lawsuit played out.
The teachers and parents asked the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis. They said allowing the law to remain in place, potentially for years, while the case worked its way through the system, could do irreparable harm.
The Supreme Court did not weigh in the teachers’ rights issues raised by the case, only on the parental rights.
The Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm focused on religious liberty that represented the parents in the case, predicted that the decision will “dismantle secret gender transition policies across the country.”
“This is a watershed moment for parental rights in America,” said Paul Jonna, special counsel at the law firm. “The Supreme Court has told California and every state in the nation in no uncertain terms: you cannot secretly transition a child behind a parent’s back.”
Attorneys for the state of California had argued their law supports the creation of safe and inclusive environments at school and allows parents to be notified, even against a student’s wishes, when there are immediate safety issues.
LGBTQ advocacy groups have said they generally encourage schools to help students find a way to involve their parents in these decisions, but not all parents are safe. Between 20% and 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, with many reporting that parental rejection and abuse contributed to them leaving home.
The court majority wrote that California could inform parents about children’s gender transitions and still ensure child safety by enforcing child abuse laws.
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
