School Trans Policies Shaken Up by Parental Rights Expansion (1)

The US Supreme Court’s emergency order in a transgender school policy case rattled dozens of lawsuits nationwide, and conservative groups are plotting a path forward to further empower parent plaintiffs.

In an 18-page opinion the conservative majority staked out a landmark position: substantive due process rights of parents entitle them to be informed by teachers when their children engage in gender transitioning at school. Even parents without religious reasons to oppose California’s statute requiring student consent to share their transitioning will likely succeed in their lawsuits, the justices said.

Though the Monday decision is a preliminary ruling, several conservative groups likened the decision to a home run for the roughly 40 live cases nationwide challenging school notification policies litigators say exist in some form in thousands of districts. They believe the court was signaling where it would go on the merits—perhaps in two cases from Massachusetts and Florida seeking full review by the high court—and they rushed to their dockets to update their courts, with some sending guidance to school districts.

“It has a huge impact,” said John Bursch, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom which is seeking high court review in the Massachusetts case, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, which could receive action from the court as soon as Monday. “In the parent rights context this will embolden parents for years who have been bullied by public school officials.”

In the days following the ruling parties are already filing briefs with the US Supreme Court, arguing Monday’s decision supports or isn’t on point with similar cases seeking review by the justices.

Critics of the ruling said it sets back rights of gender-diverse children and the districts that are trying to protect them as they work through concerns with their identity. A short opinion like this, they say, doesn’t address these questions.

“Throughout the entire decision there’s not really any discussion of the interests of transgender minors, and I think that’s something we’d see more of in a full opinion,” said Elana Redfield, director at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

Religion, Due Process

Lawyers on both sides of the issue said the decision has immense impact on future litigation involving schools. And each camp says the justices have supercharged parental rights that the court expanded last year in Mahmoud v. Taylor, when the court found a school board couldn’t prevent parents with religious objections from opting their grade school children out of LGBTQ-inclusive learning.

On March 2 the justices extended that religious protection to student gender disclosure policies but went much further in ruling that all parents’ “substantive due process rights"—an area where the court has been highly skeptical on rights such as abortion—are also a reason to invalidate school notification policies.

“The decision reaffirms the fundamental truth that parents are the primary decision makers in childrens’ education,” said Horatio Mihet, chief litigation counsel at Liberty Counsel, a group involved in these cases. That will even help plaintiffs in states like Florida, where parents have lost despite laws opposing strict notification polices.

In real terms it means courts must rapidly change their views on these policies, said Liberty Justice Center counsel Katie Cosgrove. Instead of schools being permitted to say that parents won’t be informed unless there’s a specific reason to do so, the court is saying parents should be informed unless there’s a concern over abuse from that disclosure in the home.

“This will be a signal to all those cases, school districts, and states that this does have huge constitutional implications,” said Cosgrove.

A requirement to speak up if abuse is suspected has long existed because schools are mandatory reporters on various health and safety concerns, and courts have never gone this far on affirmative communication baked into parental rights, said Chris Erchull, a senior staff attorney at GLAD Law.

“I haven’t seen any appellate case law that says there’s a substantive due process right or a free exercise right to have schools monitoring and reporting back to parents,” he said.

Monitoring What?

Lawyers involved are split in how much the court’s ruling clarified the law in this area, with some concerned that teachers could be placed into difficult situations deciding when to notify parents.

The problem lies in the justices’ tying the substantive due process rights of parents to the medical conditions of children when often there’s no medical issue at all, said Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney with Lambda Legal.

Since the court focused on children with gender dysphoria, he’d encourage schools to read this in a limited way to apply only to children with a medical diagnosis.

“This court is attempting to twist this premise of parental rights into a weapon to be used against all kinds of different people,” he said. “Just because a young person or adult for that matter identifies differently that doesn’t mean they have a medically diagnosable condition.”

Lawyers for the parents argued that since dysphoria is a medical condition schools should be compelled to notify parents if a child uses a different name or set of pronouns the same way schools notify parents if a child receives Tylenol for a headache.

Without notification, Bursch said, schools would be opening themselves to potential liability if a child expressing a different gender identity harms themselves, because plaintiff firms can use this Supreme Court ruling as evidence parents were deprived of due process rights.

Paul M. Jonna, partner at LiMandri & Jonna LLP and attorney for the Thomas More Society, which represented the parents in the case that received the Supreme Court preliminary ruling, called these notification rules “secrecy” policies and said every school should “wipe them from the books.”

“We know how all of these cases are going to end,” he said.

The case is: Mirabelli v. Bonta, U.S., No. 25A810, stay lifted 3/2/26.