On Monday evening, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a policy currently embedded in more than a thousand school districts nationwide: hiding children’s so-called “gender transitions” from their parents. The 6-3 ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta restored a class-wide permanent injunction against California’s statewide concealment regime. But the decision reaches far beyond California. Every school in America that maintains a policy of keeping secrets from families about their children’s mental health is now on constitutional notice.
The case began with two schoolteachers who refused to lie. Heading into the 2022-2023 school year, Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West received a list of seven students who had requested new names or pronouns — the parents of six of those students had no clue about the change. Teachers were expected to use the new identities and say nothing. If a parent asked, they were to deflect or deceive. Both Mirabelli and West, former teachers of the year in their school district, refused. They faced termination for their honesty.
Thomas More Society filed suit in April 2023 on their behalf. What we uncovered went far beyond one school: The California Department of Education had built a statewide infrastructure of training materials, legal guidance, and model policies that redefined student “privacy” to mean shutting out parents. Nearly 600 districts across California adopted those policies. The attorney general enforced them.
The system applied to children as young as two and contained no exception for parents who asked directly, for children in crisis, or for families of faith. Principals pointed to the state’s website and told parents and teachers alike: “It’s the law.”
The human cost was staggering. One family in our case did not learn their seventh-grade daughter had been presenting as a boy at school until she attempted suicide, was rushed to a local medical center, and then quickly moved to a psychiatric hospital three hours from home. Every teacher at the school misled the parents:
At back-to-school night, they used her legal female name and gave no indication anything was amiss. The family instead found out from a doctor, over the phone, on the worst night of their lives. A psychiatrist later testified that the hospitalizations that followed could likely have been prevented if the school had simply told the parents when the distress first appeared.
The Supreme Court found that California’s regime likely violates both free exercise of religion and due process protections for parental rights — protections traced through more than a century of precedent. Building on last year’s landmark Mahmoud v. Taylor decision, the court went further, clarifying that religious rights are not limited to core curriculum decisions, like the use of LGBT storybooks in Mahmoud, and extended those rights to cover the secret facilitation of a child’s gender transition at issue here. Six justices agreed, and even Justice Kagan in dissent conceded that California’s policy “could have crossed the constitutional line.”
The due process holding is what makes this decision transformative. Mahmoud protected only religious parents, and Mirabelli now closes the gap. The parental right to know what is happening with your child at school, and to participate in decisions about your child’s mental health and medical treatments, belongs to every parent. Religious or secular, conservative or liberal. The due process right recognized in Mirabelli does not depend on what you believe, it depends on who you are: a parent.
That distinction matters immediately and practically. The injunction the Supreme Court restored orders California to include in its own teacher training materials a notice of parents’ constitutional right to be informed when a child expresses gender incongruence. For years, California used training programs to build a culture of secrecy. Now the state must use those same channels to dismantle it.
This is not just California’s problem to fix. More than a thousand school districts from coast to coast maintain similar concealment frameworks — policies that instruct school personnel to hide information about a child’s identity, mental health, and well-being from the people most responsible for that child’s welfare. Every one of those districts is now operating under a constitutional cloud.
The rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children predate public education itself. The Supreme Court has reminded the country that no school bureaucracy can override these fundamental rights.
Peter Breen is executive vice president and head of litigation at Thomas More Society, the nonprofit public interest law firm that represents the plaintiffs in Mirabelli v. Bonta.
