Becket to Appeals Court: Stop California from trampling parental rights Despite losing at SCOTUS, California keeps trying to transition students behind their parents’ backs

WASHINGTON – Becket filed a friend-of-the-court brief yesterday urging a federal appeals court to stop California from facilitating students’ gender transitions behind their parents’ backs. In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Supreme Court blocked California’s secret gender-transition policy earlier this year—but now California is seeking to evade that ruling. The state claims it will tell parents about their child’s gender expression if they ask, but otherwise parents will stay in the dark. Either way, California still refuses to respect parents’ instructions regarding the names and pronouns used for their child at school. 

Becket’s brief argues that centuries of history and tradition, and recent Supreme Court precedent, including Becket’s landmark victory in Mahmoud v. Taylor, confirm that parents—not the government—have the fundamental right to know what is happening with their children and decide how to handle important issues like a child’s gender transition.

“California’s attempt to weasel out of the Supreme Court’s parental-rights rulings is egregious and shameful,” said Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket. “The state should stop searching for loopholes and start following the Constitution. In America, parents get to raise their children, not the state.”

California’s Department of Education issued guidance that directed public schools to treat a child as a different gender if the child wanted and to hide that fact from the child’s parents, even lying to the parents if necessary. Schools were told to respect a student’s wishes about who could be informed—including whether parents would be told at all—leaving parents in the dark and forcing teachers to lie to parents. In a breathtaking assertion of government power, California has even warned that requiring schools to respect parents’ directions about the names and pronouns used for their children would “transform[] public schools into agents of parents.”

Catholic families involved in the case discovered that their children had been socially transitioned at school without their knowledge or consent, cutting them out of decisions central to their children’s upbringing and faith. In one family’s case, the parents learned what had been happening only after their daughter attempted suicide. Teachers also challenged the policy, arguing that being required to hide a student’s transgender status and lie to parents violated their deeply held religious beliefs about honoring the role of parents as the primary guides in raising their children. After the Supreme Court blocked California’s policy earlier this year, the case returned to the Ninth Circuit.

“Secretly transitioning children at school and forcing teachers to lie about it to parents is like something out of Orwell,” said Windham. “No amount of doublespeak can change the fact that this policy is flatly unconstitutional. We’re confident the Ninth Circuit will say so here.”

The parents and teachers are represented by LiMandri & Jonna and Thomas More Society.