On the afternoon of March 2, 2026, the United States Supreme Court answered Thomas More Society’s emergency application with a ruling that will reshape parental rights law for a generation. In a per curiam opinion—joined by a forceful concurrence from Justices Barrett, Roberts, and Kavanaugh—the Court issued a 6-3 decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta, holding that California’s secret “gender transition” policies in public schools likely violate parents’ constitutional rights. The decision restored the class-wide injunction that Thomas More Society had spent nearly three years fighting to secure. As with many such victories, one of the most significant parental rights rulings in a generation began with ordinary people who refused to do wrong.

What California had built was a statewide regime of secrecy. Under the state’s “Parental Exclusion Policies,” schools across the state were directed to facilitate children’s (so-called) “gender transitions” during school hours—changing names, pronouns, gender presentation, and even access to opposite-sex facilities—while actively concealing these changes from parents. Teachers were compelled to use one set of pronouns at school and another when speaking with mothers and fathers, forcing them to systematically deceive the families they served.

The toll on families was devastating. One family who joined the case as class representatives—identified as the “Poe” family to protect their daughter’s privacy—discovered that their seventh-grade daughter had been secretly socially transitioned to a male identity at school. Teachers and staff treated her as a boy throughout the school day without a word to her parents, devout Catholics who would have intervened immediately had they known. They only learned what was happening after their daughter attempted suicide and was hospitalized. Another family, the “Does,” confronted their daughter’s school principal directly when they suspected the same was happening to their child. The school’s response was chilling: state law forbade them from disclosing anything about a child’s gender identity without the child’s consent. Unable to afford private school, the family had no choice but to transfer their daughter to another school and place her in therapy. The state had built a wall between parents and their own children, and dared them to try to tear it down.

Two teachers did exactly that. In April 2023, Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, California public school educators, filed a federal lawsuit with the help of Thomas More Society against their school district and the California Department of Education. Both had been ordered to deceive parents about their own children’s gender transitions at school—using one set of pronouns in the classroom and another during parent conferences—and both refused to choose between their deeply held religious convictions and their careers.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez saw the case clearly from the start. In September 2023, he issued a preliminary injunction and labeled the policies a “trifecta of harm” to children, parents, and teachers. But California fought back. Attorney General Rob Bonta issued guidance encouraging schools to maintain the secrecy policies despite the court order. The school district slow-walked compliance for months, keeping Elizabeth and Lori out of their classrooms until a federal court ordered their reinstatement.

Thomas More Society pressed forward, expanding the case at every opportunity. New plaintiffs were added—parents like the Poe and Doe families, additional teachers—and Attorney General Bonta himself was added as a defendant. The case grew from two teachers in one school district into something California had never seen coming.

In July 2025, Thomas More Society attorneys filed a comprehensive motion for summary judgment that laid bare the full scope of California’s coordinated effort to institutionalize Parental Exclusion Policies statewide. The briefing challenged the ideology underlying the state’s expert testimony and presented devastating evidence of what these policies do to real children and real families when parents are shut out.

Judge Benitez agreed. In an unprecedented order, he certified the class action—representing California parents who object to secret gender transition policies and teachers who object to enforcing them. On November 17, Thomas More Society attorneys argued for summary judgment before Judge Benitez, making the case that California’s secrecy regime was unconstitutional on its face and as applied to every parent and teacher in the certified class. Five weeks later, on December 22, Judge Benitez delivered a historic ruling. He granted summary judgment and issued a class-wide permanent injunction ending California’s Parental Exclusion Policies statewide—finding that the secrecy regime violated both the Free Exercise Clause and the Due Process Clause.

It was the first time a federal court had declared gender secrecy policies unconstitutional on a statewide, class-wide basis—a landmark victory handed down just days before Christmas. California moved immediately to undo it. The Ninth Circuit stayed Judge Benitez’s injunction on January 5, 2026, temporarily reviving the secrecy policies. Thomas More Society attorneys petitioned the Supreme Court for emergency relief restoring these critical and hard-won protections.

“California’s policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

The Court’s watershed response to the emergency request left no room for ambiguity. Writing that California’s policies “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents,” the per curiam majority held that secretly facilitating a child’s gender transition was an even greater intrusion on parents’ rights than the government actions struck down in last year’s Mahmoud v. Taylor. The Court restored the injunction for the class of parents, affirming that mothers and fathers—not the state—hold primary authority over the upbringing and education of their children, including the right not to be “shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.” And while the order formally applies to parents, not teachers, the logic of the decision protects teachers, too. As Elizabeth and Lori wrote in National Review after the ruling: “If parents have a constitutional right to know about their child’s gender transition at school, then California cannot punish a teacher for providing that information. You cannot have a right to receive the truth if the person who would tell it can be fired for speaking.”

Even Justice Kagan, writing in dissent, conceded that parents possess constitutional rights over their children’s upbringing—a telling acknowledgment of just how firm the ground beneath this ruling stands.

The implications reach far beyond California. Secret gender transition policies operate in school districts across the country, and the Supreme Court’s holding in Mirabelli now gives every parent a constitutional framework to challenge them. Several similar cases are already pending before the Court. The ruling establishes that these policies trigger strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause and violate substantive due process—a precedent with nationwide reach.

California, predictably, has not stopped fighting. Days after the Supreme Court ruling, the state filed an emergency motion with the Ninth Circuit attempting to carve out exceptions and narrow the decision. The Ninth Circuit rejected the bid outright, sending California back to Judge Benitez. “California has now lost at the district court, lost at the Supreme Court, and been turned away by the Ninth Circuit,” said Peter Breen, TMS Executive VP and Head of Litigation. “California built a wall of secrecy between parents and their own children, and the Supreme Court just tore it down.”

For the Poe and Doe families, for Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, and for the parents and teachers they now represent across California and beyond—the wall of secrecy has been torn down. But the fight to keep it down, in California and nationwide, will continue.