California Attorney General Rob Bonta is urging the Supreme Court to keep alive the state's so-called gender secrecy policies — school rules that allow districts to socially transition children without telling their parents. The state filed its opposition after parents and teachers asked Justice Elena Kagan to vacate a 9th Circuit stay that currently blocks a federal judge's permanent injunction against the policies.
The parents' argument is blunt. California, they say in court filings, "balances the parent's interests like McDonald's balances the cow's."
Two years of litigation. Full discovery. A class action certification. A permanent injunction from U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez. And now the whole thing lands at the Supreme Court's doorstep — because the 9th Circuit, until recent years the most overturned federal appeals court in America, decided to hit pause on Benitez's order.
Strip away the legal filings and the bureaucratic euphemisms, and here is what California's position amounts to: schools may decide, without parental knowledge or consent, to call a child by a different name and pronouns, socially transition them in the classroom, and keep it all hidden from the people who are legally, morally, and biologically responsible for that child, as Just The News reports.
Bonta's opposition frames this as nuance. Schools, he argues, "may balance parental interests with students' particular needs and circumstances" around gender identity disclosure. The challenged state laws, he claims, "allow, and even require, disclosure in certain circumstances — in particular, where there is a risk of serious harm to the student."
That sounds reasonable until you examine what the state actually did with those laws. According to the plaintiffs, Bonta's office repeatedly threatened school districts that adopted the reasoning of Benitez's 2023 preliminary injunction against the Escondido Union School District. He went after districts that sought to inform parents. He worked to tank a related ballot initiative. A California legislative committee refused to even hold a hearing on parental notification legislation proposed by Our Duty USA.
The message to school districts was unambiguous: keep parents in the dark, or face the attorney general's wrath.
California wants this debate to stay abstract — a matter of competing legal frameworks and institutional discretion. The families in this case won't let it.
One pair of plaintiff parents discovered their daughter's school had secretly transitioned her for nearly a year, before she attempted suicide. Last fall, the school told the parents it would continue using their daughter's preferred name and pronouns even after the attempt. Another family learned their daughter had been socially transitioned as early as fifth grade without their knowledge.
Then there is Abigail Martinez, whose story appears in an amicus brief filed by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign and Our Duty USA. Martinez has spoken about how her daughter Yaeli's school allegedly helped the girl escape her mother through false abuse claims and obtain what the brief describes as "sex-rejecting interventions." Yaeli died by suicide.
Paul Jonna, special counsel for the Thomas More Society representing the plaintiffs, put it plainly:
"The state assumes parents are unfit, seizes unchecked authority over children, and forces schools into deception. This isn't an argument about abstract laws and regulations. There are real lives at stake."
California produced no admissible evidence across two years of litigation and full discovery that parental involvement harms children. Not a single piece. The state's own expert witnesses, according to the plaintiffs, undermined the safety rationale under cross-examination. Bonta's entire framework — that schools need latitude to protect children from dangerous parents — rests on a foundation he could not prove in court.
This case doesn't exist in a vacuum. Statistics from Defending Education documented approximately 1,200 school districts covering a quarter of all public school students with secret-transition policies last spring. California, New York, and New Jersey have pushed the envelope the furthest, shielding school officials from liability for hiding a child's gender expression from parents.
Florida, Montana, and West Virginia filed an amicus brief making two critical points. First, the substance:
"Intervention of this kind is highly destructive and can lead to permanent damage to the child's mental and physical health."
Second, the legal urgency:
"Lower courts need clarity to resolve the increasing number of parental-rights disputes in this context."
They're right on both counts. Without Supreme Court guidance, blue-state attorneys general will continue running the same playbook — pass vague laws granting schools discretion, then use enforcement threats to ensure that discretion always runs in one direction: away from parents.
The plaintiffs cite two significant Supreme Court precedents. The Mahmoud decision blocked a suburban D.C. school district from teaching LGBTQ storybooks to young children without parental notice and opt-out. Yoder, the landmark Amish homeschooling case, required Wisconsin to meet the highest level of judicial scrutiny before forcing Amish teenagers into public school.
The Child and Parental Rights Campaign and Our Duty USA argue in their joint brief that the 9th Circuit abandoned "over 100 years of precedent" by letting schools exclude parents "based solely on speculation of potential harm or parental disagreement with the government's chosen approach for their confused child."
That last phrase cuts to the core of the matter. California's position isn't really about protecting children from abusive parents. It's about protecting a particular ideological approach to gender from parents who disagree with it. The "safety" framing is a shield. The sword is institutional control over children's most fundamental sense of identity — exercised behind their parents' backs.
Justice Kagan now has the application. She can act alone or refer it to the full Court. California's opposition filing called Benitez's permanent injunction "extreme" — a revealing choice of words for a judicial order that simply says schools cannot systematically deceive parents about their own children.
Judge Benitez, a George W. Bush nominee, has compared litigating against California on this issue to "wrestling with a bowl of Jell-O." He threatened to sanction the state for misleading him into mooting the case. The state's legal strategy has been delay, obstruct, and threaten — all in service of maintaining a policy regime it could not defend on the evidence.
Bonta's opposition notes that the plaintiffs earlier withdrew their request for a classwide preliminary injunction and litigated a permanent injunction on an ordinary schedule. The implication: this isn't really an emergency. But for the parents whose children were transitioned without their knowledge — one of whom attempted suicide — the word "emergency" doesn't begin to cover it.
A quarter of all public school students in America attend districts with these policies. The Supreme Court has the chance to say what should never have needed saying: parents have the right to know what is happening to their children.
