Federal Judge Blocks California Law Requiring Teachers To Hide Children’s Gender Identity

A U.S. District Court judge blocked California from forcing teachers to lie to parents about their children’s secret gender transitions in a major ruling on Monday.

The case stemmed from a class-action lawsuit brought by two Christian teachers who pushed back against the law requiring them to hide students’ gender transitions from parents and use students’ preferred pronouns. Monday’s ruling from Judge Roger T. Benitez “permanently” ends “California’s dangerous and unconstitutional regime of gender secrecy policies in schools,” according to the Thomas More Society, which filed the lawsuit.

“In a landmark class-action ruling, Thomas More Society achieved a historic victory in Mirabelli, et al. v. Olson, et al., ending California’s gender secrecy policies and restoring transparency and parental involvement in public education,” the Thomas More Society said. “The decision and federal court order issuing a class-wide permanent injunction—issued by U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez just days before Christmas—secures justice not only for teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West who began the lawsuit, but for all parents and teachers harmed by these policies statewide.”

Benitez wrote that the case dealt with “four questions about a parent’s rights to information as against a public school’s policy of secrecy when it comes to a student’s gender identification.” Those questions were:

1. Do parents have a right to gender information based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s substantive due process clause?
2. Do parents have a right to gender information protected by the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause?
3. Do religious public school teachers have a right to provide gender information to parents based on the First Amendment’s free exercise clause?
4. Do public school teachers have a right to communicate accurate gender information to parents based on the First Amendment free speech clause?

“In each case, this Court concludes that, as a matter of law, the answer is ‘yes,” he wrote. “Parents have a right to receive gender information and teachers have a right to provide to parents accurate information about a child’s gender identity.”

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“California’s public school system parental exclusion policies place a communication barrier between parents and teachers,” he opined. “Some parents who do not want such barriers may have the wherewithal to place their children in private schools or homeschool, or to move to a different public school district. Families in middle or lower socio-economic circumstances have no such options.  For these parents, the new policy appears to undermine their own constitutional rights while it conflicts with knowledgeable medical opinion.  The State Defendants are, in essence, asking this Court to limit, and restrict a common-sense and legally sound description by the United States Supreme Court of parental rights.  That, this Court will not do.”

“The parental exclusion policies create a trifecta of harm: they harm the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. They harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children, and by substantially burdening many parents’ First Amendment right to train their children in their sincerely held religious beliefs  And finally, they harm teachers who are compelled to violate the sincerely held beliefs and the parent’s rights by forcing them to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students,” he concluded.