SCOTUS Sides With California Parents In School Transgender Dispute

The Supreme Court on Monday evening granted a request from a group of parents in California to reinstate a ruling by a federal district court prohibiting schools in the state from “misleading parents about their children’s gender presentation.” In addition, the ruling requires schools to follow parents’ instructions regarding the names and pronouns that children use there.

In a detailed seven-page ruling, the majority clarified that the parents were likely to succeed in their argument that California’s policies infringe upon their right to freely practice their religion and their right to guide the upbringing and education of their children.

Two of the court’s left-wing justices, Elena Kagan, joined by Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the court’s ruling, arguing that Monday’s ruling “shows, not for the first time, how our emergency docket can malfunction.”

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The dispute originated in 2023, when two teachers filed a lawsuit against the school district seeking an exemption from its policies on gender and pronouns. They were later joined by parents of children who either socially transitioned at school or believed their children had done so.

After the district court ruled in favor of the challengers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit temporarily suspended that ruling while the state appealed the decision. The challengers then escalated the case to the Supreme Court, asking the justices for intervention.

In a nuanced decision on Monday night, the majority ruled in favor of the parents but rejected the teachers’ request. The majority explained that the parents were likely to succeed in their claim that the state’s policies interfere with their religious freedom.

The majority wrote that the policies are subject to the most stringent constitutional test, which is known as strict scrutiny, because “they substantially interfere with the ‘right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.’”

The policies can’t pass that test, the majority noted further, regardless of the state’s claim that the “policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy” because they “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

Moreover, the majority wrote, parents have long had “primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children,” including “the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”

In a seven-page dissenting opinion, Kagan criticized the court’s decision to resolve the case using the interim docket. She claimed that the high court “receive[d] scant and, frankly, inadequate briefing about the legal issues in dispute” and then, without having any oral argument, “grant[ed] relief by means of a terse, tonally dismissive ruling designed to conclusively resolve the dispute.”

Kagan further wrote that the court could resolve the issue at the center of this case in “the regular way, on our merits docket.” She pointed out that the court has been revisiting a petition for review in a similar case repeatedly since November.

“Why not, then, just grant” review in that case, she asked, “and decide it this coming fall?”

“Our processes are, in short, the hallmark of judicial probity, and alike its guarantor. There was no reason to abandon them here,” she concluded.

In a four-page concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, addressed and countered Justice Kagan’s criticism.

Barrett argued the majority’s ruling that “the parents are likely to succeed on the merits” is a “preliminary” one. She then said that the interim relief decision “is not a sign of the Court’s ‘impatience’ to reach the merits,” but rather “reflects the Court’s judgment about the risk of irreparable harm to the parents.”

If the 9th Circuit’s order is not lifted, she added, “parents will be excluded—perhaps for years—from participating in consequential decisions about their child’s mental health and wellbeing.”