A federal judge handed a group of parents and teachers a major victory late Monday by ruling the state of California ran afoul of the Constitution with a public school policy to hide students’ gender identity and preferred pronouns from parents.
The lawsuit, brought by teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West in 2023, challenged the legality of a policy that required teachers not to inform parents of a child’s gender transition at school or use different pronouns, saying it forced them to either withhold information from parents or face retaliation. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez sided with the teachers, finding the California public school policy unconstitutionally hides information from parents.
“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,” Benitez said in his lengthy ruling.
Benitez, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, also rejected California officials’ arguments that the policy is needed to “prevent bullying and harassment.”
“Preventing student bullying and harassment in school is a laudable goal. The problem is that the parent exclusion policies seem to presume that it is the parents that will be the harassers from whom students need to be protected,” Benitez said, noting that regardless “such a policy cannot be implemented at the expense of parents’ constitutional rights.”
“California’s education policymakers may be experts on primary and secondary education but they would not receive top grades as students of Constitutional Law,” Benitez said.
The ruling also included a class-wide permanent injunction preventing the policy from being implemented, instead requiring state officials to include a statement in a “prominent place” of state training materials asserting parents’ right to be informed of their child’s “gender incongruence.”
“We loved our jobs, our students, and the school communities we served,” Mirabelli and West said in a joint statement Monday. “But we were forced into an impossible position when school officials demanded that we lie to parents—violating not only our faith, but also the trust that must exist between teachers and families. No educator should ever be placed in that situation.”
“This victory is not just ours. It is a win for honesty, transparency, and the fundamental rights of teachers and parents. We are so thankful that this chapter is finally closed and that justice has prevailed,” the two teachers said.
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California officials could appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Parental rights have been a hot-button matter in federal courts in recent years, reaching the Supreme Court earlier this year when the justices ruled parents should be allowed to opt their children out of LGBT books and curriculum in schools. The high court ruled 6-3 in June that not allowing opt-outs of those materials violated parents’ religious liberty rights.