SCOTUS Rules California Likely Violated Parents’ Constitutional Rights

Washington, DC – March 5, 2026

On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States granted emergency relief in Mirabelli v. Bonta (25A810), vacating the Ninth Circuit’s stay of a district court permanent injunction against California policies requiring schools to conceal a child’s asserted transgender status from parents and to actively facilitate a child’s “social transition” over parental objections.

The Court granted the application to vacate the stay as to the parent plaintiffs, concluding they are likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional claims.

At issue are California policies allowing schools to socially transition children while withholding that information from their parents. Teachers are required to use one name and set of pronouns at school and another when communicating with parents.

These policies have inflicted devastating harm on children and families. In one case, the parents of a junior-high girl were unaware that their daughter was being treated as a male at school for nearly a year. They learned the truth only after she attempted suicide and was hospitalized.

After extensive discovery and a fully developed factual record, the district court granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs and entered a permanent injunction blocking the policy. The Ninth Circuit later stayed that injunction pending appeal—allowing the state’s regime of secrecy and coercion to continue.

The Supreme Court has now vacated the stay as it applies to the parents.

In its opinion, the Court concluded that California’s policies likely violate both the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

On the First Amendment, the Court held that California’s “unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition” is an even greater intrusion on parental rights than the government action struck down in last year’s Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case AFLDS also supported. The Court also reaffirmed a core constitutional principle: parents, not the State, hold primary authority over “the upbringing and education of children,” including the right not to be “shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”

America’s Frontline Doctors maintains that secret social “transitions” are not neutral accommodations. As documented in our amici curiae brief and exposed in the AFLDS documentary What Is a Doctor?, this practice is a major step in the ideological process that conditions children to reject biological reality and sets them on a path toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, irreversible sterilization, permanent loss of sexual function, lifelong medical dependency, and surgical mutilation of healthy bodies.

AFLDS attorney David Dalia said, “The entire Nation should be very grateful to the Supreme Court in Mirabelli for reinstating the well-founded injunction against this dangerous California ‘Parental Exclusion’ school policy. That policy allowed schools to secretly push vulnerable children to adopt a false identity as the opposite sex without their parents’ knowledge or consent, and even over parental objections. It went so far as to require teachers to deceive parents in order to conceal these actions. Such a policy tramples fundamental constitutional parental rights.

Many Americans remain unaware that thousands of public schools have adopted similar policies, encouraging children to present themselves as the opposite sex through different names, pronouns, and cross-dressing while deliberately excluding parents from these decisions. The Court’s ruling restores constitutional limits on government authority and will have nationwide implications as more than 6,000 schools have adopted comparable ‘secret transition’ policies and over 40 legal challenges are now underway to end these unconstitutional practices.”

AFLDS Founder and President Dr. Simone Gold added,  “Children are not wards of the state. They belong to their parents. Schools have no authority to deceive families or replace parental judgment with ideological mandates. This ruling is an important victory, but we will not stop. Frontline Doctors will continue supporting these cases with the unique medical perspective as the only physician-led organization appearing before the courts on these issues until the medical mutilation of children is stopped in this country, once and for all.”

Alongside Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, currently pending before the Supreme Court, Mirabelli v. Bonta helps clarify whether parents retain the constitutional authority to raise and protect their children, or whether the state may claim that authority under the guise of education and privacy.

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Media Contact Lisa Alexander, Executive Director | Media@AFLDS.org