U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ordered California to pay $4.52 million in attorneys' fees on Tuesday after the state lost a years-long legal battle against parents who challenged so-called "gender secrecy policies" in public schools. The policies hid students' gender identity from their parents and forced teachers to withhold that information.
The fee award came with a 1.25 multiplier, a rare enhancement that reflects just how significant the court found this case to be. California didn't just lose. It lost repeatedly, at every level, and kept fighting anyway.
Now, taxpayers get the bill.
Judge Benitez's order paints a picture of a state government that treated the courtroom less like a forum for justice and more like a war of attrition against its own citizens. According to Just the News, he described the state's conduct as "litigation intransigence," and the timeline supports that characterization.
Early in the case, Benitez denied the defendants' motion to dismiss. Rather than recalibrate, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and the Board of Education asked for judgment on the pleadings. When plaintiffs amended their complaint, the state filed new motions to dismiss and new motions for judgment on the pleadings. When plaintiffs sought to certify a class action, Attorney General Rob Bonta moved to dismiss. A week after Benitez denied motions to dismiss, Thurmond filed yet another motion to dismiss.
The pattern is unmistakable. Every procedural tool available was thrown at this case, not to resolve it, but to exhaust the parents bringing it.
Benitez noted that California's defendants "formally withdrew arguments after they were shown to be inarguably meritless." They didn't withdraw them because they reconsidered. They withdrew them because the arguments collapsed on contact with scrutiny.
The state's refusal to accept the outcome extended well past the trial court. In late December, California asked Benitez to stay his permanent injunction. Just a day later, the state filed an appeal. Benitez described this as an attempt to "sidestep the effect" of his orders, calling it:
"Effectively wasting scarce judicial resources during a statewide winter break from public education, the necessity of which remains unexplained."
When the Supreme Court upheld the injunction, California still wasn't finished. The state went over Benitez's head to try to get the permanent injunction amended. A federal appeals court rejected that effort.
Benitez wrote that the case produced "impressive results through three years of dogged litigation," and he made clear where the blame for that duration belonged. He found that the state's public education policies "rejected and subverted the federal constitutional rights of California parents to guide the health and well-being of their school-age children."
Those are not the words of a judge who found this to be a close call.
The Thomas More Society, which supported the plaintiffs' legal effort, noted that the 1.25 fee multiplier is reserved for extraordinary circumstances. According to the organization, the court found that every factor justified it:
"A rare enhancement reserved for cases of exceptional importance and outstanding results. The Court found every factor justified the multiplier: the constitutional significance of the case, the results achieved, the undesirability of the case, and the likelihood that no other attorney would have accepted it."
That last point deserves attention. The court recognized that this was a case most lawyers wouldn't touch. Suing a state government over gender ideology in schools is not a career-enhancing move in most legal circles. The families who brought this case and the attorneys who represented them did so knowing the institutional pressure would be enormous.
Benitez found that the plaintiffs' lawyers' time was "reasonably incurred," excluding certain work from the calculation but affirming the bulk of it. He called their approach "strategic."
Executive Vice President Peter Breen framed the ruling as a precedent with national reach:
"Sends an unmistakable message to state governments and school districts across the country: if you trample the constitutional rights of parents, you will pay for it—literally."
Breen noted that the state exhausted its legal arsenal and still came up empty:
"It lost at summary judgment, lost at the Supreme Court, and now Californians will foot the bill for their government officials' refusal to respect the fundamental rights of families."
This is the part that should concentrate minds in state capitals. California didn't just adopt a bad policy. It spent three years and untold resources defending the proposition that the government has the right to keep secrets about children from their own parents, then force teachers to participate in the deception. And when court after court said no, the state kept litigating.
The $4.52 million is what the state owes in legal fees. The deeper cost is harder to quantify.
Consider what California's position actually was: that parents have no constitutional right to know what name and pronouns their child uses at school. That teachers should be conscripted into withholding information about a child's psychological state from the people legally responsible for that child's welfare. The state's interest in affirming a minor's self-declared identity outweighs a family's First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
Benitez found that these policies "impinged on families' right to the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment." The state fought that finding all the way to the Supreme Court and lost.
Yet as Benitez observed, even now, the state refuses to concede the fundamental point:
"To this day, the Defendants continue to fight about the merits based on the thinnest of arguments."
Three years. Motions stacked on motions. Appeals after the Supreme Court itself weighed in. And California's officials still believe they were right to build a wall of secrecy between parents and their children.
The $4.52 million is the price tag. The conviction that produced it remains unshaken in Sacramento. That should tell parents everything they need to know about what California's education establishment thinks of them.
