The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has denied California's emergency request to modify language from a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down policies allowing public schools to hide a student's gender transition from parents. The ruling is another decisive loss for a state that has spent years trying to insert itself between parents and their children.
California filed the emergency motion seeking to revise the language of a permanent injunction against the policy. The 9th Circuit wasn't having it, ruling that any effort to modify the injunction in Mirabelli v. Bonta must be addressed by the district court, not the appellate court.
The state tried to go over the lower court's head. The appellate court sent it right back down.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that California's policies violated the First and 14th Amendments. The decision vacated a 9th Circuit stay order that had paused a lower court injunction blocking the gender policy. That injunction, issued by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, came after he certified the case as a class action in December and issued a permanent injunction against the state's policies.
The permanent injunction's language is unambiguous, Center Square noted:
"Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence, teachers and school staff having a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence."
The injunction went further:
"These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary."
That's the Supreme Court of the United States, with a commanding 6-3 majority, affirming that parents have a constitutional right to know what is happening with their own children in public schools. And that no state law, regulation, or policy can override it.
Paul M. Jonna, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, didn't mince words about California's maneuver. He called the motion a "desperate attempt" and laid out why the 9th Circuit was right to reject it:
"It was obviously a very desperate attempt to have the 9th Circuit improperly rewrite the injunction."
"We're glad that the 9th Circuit did not accept that invitation into error."
Jonna also pointed to language in the Supreme Court's ruling that undercuts California's apparent concern that the injunction somehow endangers children in abusive homes. Quoting the ruling, he noted that the injunction "permits the state to shield children from unfit parents by enforcing child abuse laws and removing children from parental custody in appropriate cases."
In other words, the safeguard California claimed to be worried about already exists. The state just didn't want to acknowledge it because doing so would strip away its last rhetorical justification for the policy.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office was contacted for comment. No response. The California Department of Education said it "cannot comment on pending litigation."
That's convenient. A state that spent enormous political capital defending a policy of keeping secrets from parents now has nothing to say when the courts dismantle it at every level. The Supreme Court ruled against them. The 9th Circuit, a court not exactly known for its conservative leanings, refused to bail them out. And the officials who championed these policies have gone quiet.
Strip away the legal procedural maneuvering, and the core question here is simple: Do parents have the right to know what is happening with their children in government-run schools?
California's answer, for years, was no. The state built a framework that empowered school staff to act as ideological gatekeepers, deciding what information parents deserved to receive about their own kids. Teachers were placed in the impossible position of being required to conceal information from the very people legally responsible for a child's welfare.
The constitutional problems with this arrangement were always obvious. The First Amendment protects the right of school staff to communicate truthfully with parents. The 14th Amendment protects parental rights over the upbringing of their children. California's policies ran headlong into both.
What's remarkable is how far California was willing to go to defend the indefensible. After losing at the district court level, after losing at the Supreme Court in a lopsided 6-3 decision, the state's response was to rush to the 9th Circuit with an emergency motion to rewrite the terms of its own defeat.
Three courts. Three losses. And still no willingness to accept that parents come first.
The Supreme Court's ruling keeps in place a statewide block on these policies, and the 9th Circuit's refusal to intervene reinforces the finality of that decision. For families across California and potentially across the country, this establishes a clear constitutional floor: schools cannot build walls of secrecy between children and their parents on matters this significant.
Other states that have pursued similar policies should take note. The highest court in the land has spoken, and the legal architecture supporting parental notification is now reinforced at every level of the federal judiciary.
California gambled that it could use the machinery of public education to override the most fundamental relationship in a child's life. The courts told them, three times over, that the Constitution disagrees.
