Supreme Court temporarily blocks California policy against parental notification of gender identity

WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on March 2 temporarily blocked California from enforcing policies that generally prohibit public school teachers from notifying parents about a student's sexual orientation or gender identity, as litigation over that policy proceeds.

A group of educators and parents previously sued California in Mirabelli v. Bonta over the policy in federal court, arguing it violated their religious beliefs.

"The parents who assert a free exercise claim have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs," the court's majority wrote in an unsigned opinion.

A federal trial judge previously sided with the parents and teachers, blocking the state from enforcing the policy, but an appeals panel later put it on hold. The high court's order reinstated, for now, the lower court's ruling.

Critics of the California policy argue parents have a right to know if their child uses names or pronouns at school that do not correspond with their biological sex, while supporters argue that the policy might prevent abuse at home.

Peter Breen, executive vice president and head of litigation at Thomas More Society, a legal group among those representing the parents, said in a statement, "No more can bureaucrats secretly facilitate a child's gender transition while shutting out parents."

"California built a wall of secrecy between parents and their own children, and the Supreme Court just tore it down," he said. "This groundbreaking ruling will protect parents' rights to raise their children as they see fit for years to come."

In an unsigned order, the court's majority said, "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."

"These policies likely violate parents' rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children," the court's majority said.

But in a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued the majority used "shortcut procedures on the emergency docket" to grant the request, although the "ordinary appellate process has barely started; only a district court has ruled on the case's merits."

"The Court receives scant and, frankly, inadequate briefing about the legal issues in dispute," she argued, adding the order shows "how our emergency docket can malfunction."

According to Becket, a religious liberty law firm that filed an amicus brief in the case, Catholic families involved in the case discovered that their children had been socially transitioned at school without their knowledge or consent.

"Parents' fundamental right to raise their children according to their faith doesn't stop at the schoolhouse door," Mark Rienzi, Becket president and CEO, said in a statement. "California tried cutting parents out of their children's lives while forcing teachers to hide the school's behavior from parents. We're glad the Court stepped in to block this anti-family, anti-American policy."

In guidance on health care policy and practices released in March 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine stated the Church's opposition to interventions that "involve the use of surgical or chemical techniques that aim to exchange the sex characteristics of a patient's body for those of the opposite sex or for simulations thereof."

"Any technological intervention that does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body, ultimately does not help but, rather, harms the human person," the document states.