California Law Hiding Trans Identity From Parents Heads to Supreme Court

In 2024, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law which made it illegal for teachers in California schools to inform parents that their children were socially transitioning at school. This was almost universally described by the media as an anti-outing bill.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a bill to protect transgender and gay students from being outed to their parents, making California the first state to explicitly prohibit school districts from adopting such requirements.

The new law will override policies passed by school boards in red pockets of the state that required staff to notify parents whose children showed signs of being transgender…

“Safe and supportive schools for all our children should be our top priority,” state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, the Democratic chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, said in a statement. “And at the end of the day that’s what this bill does, ensures our K-12 campuses remain safe and affirming places for our youth no matter how they identify.”

The idea that children are safer at school than at home is outrageous, as is calling this an anti-outing bill. The whole idea here is that these children have already outed themselves publicly in some way at school, i.e. by asking teachers to publicly use different pronouns. So the only people the law seeks to keep in the dark are the parents.

But late last year a judge in San Diego ruled that the law violated the constitutional rights of parents.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, of San Diego, ruled in favor of two Escondido Union School District teachers, Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, who claimed that district policies “flatly prohibit teachers from respecting parents’ wishes.” The middle school teachers named district officials in the suit and said district policies violated the teachers’ constitutional free speech and religious rights.

Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his order granting summary judgment that California’s public schools “place a communication barrier between parents and teachers.” The judgment applies to all California public schools, not just the original North San Diego County district.

“Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence,” Benitez wrote. “Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence.”

California’s AG Rob Bonta then filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit asking for a stay of the ruling. On Dec. 26th the 9th Circuit issued a stay. Then on Monday of this week, the same panel of judges issued a pause while an appeal is pending.

A court order giving California teachers full freedom to tell parents about their child’s gender identity at school is on hold after an appellate panel blocked it from going into immediate effect.

Had the three-member panel not acted, the ruling, by a federal district judge, would have required immediate changes to policies at hundreds of school systems up and down the state.

According to data cited in the original ruling, at least 598 of the state’s 1,000 school systems have policies restricting what parents can be told about their child’s gender expression at school — if the child requests confidentiality.

But as of today, the Thomas More Society, which brought the challenge against the law, is making an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

An emergency appeal filed Thursday asks the high court to reinstate a judge’s ruling late last year that allowed parents with religious objections to opt out of the law’s provisions that require public school teachers not to tell parents if a child asks to use different pronouns or adopt a different gender identity.

“Parents only relinquish authority needed for the school to carry out its ‘educational mission’… they do not delegate the authority to make decisions regarding whether their child is a boy or a girl,” attorneys from the Thomas More Society wrote in the new appeal…

The new appeal repeatedly invokes a Supreme Court ruling last June, in a case from Montgomery County, Maryland, that public schools violated parents’ First Amendment rights to religious exercise by not allowing them to opt out of particular lessons.

AG Bonta’s office is vowing to fight on but I think they are going to lose this battle. Of course, this is just an appeal over the stay. Bonta can still make a full appeal of Judge Benitez’s ruling, but in the short run I think he’s going to lose.

That said, it’s not always easy to predict what the Supreme Court might do. In this case they haven’t even agreed to hear the emergency appeal. So stay tuned and maybe we’ll have an answer in the next week or so.

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