On March 2, the Supreme Court voted in a 6–3 decision to allow California parents the right to be informed if their child chooses to socially enact gender transition at school. The Bulletin sat down with Adele Keim, legal counsel at the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, to understand more about this landmark case, not only for parental rights regarding their children’s gender expression but for religious freedom more broadly. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation in episode 263.
What was argued in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the case brought to the Supreme Court?
This case was originally filed by two teachers and two families in California. All of them were Catholic. The parents had gone to their children’s schools and said, We think something’s going on with our child. Have you socially transitioned them? Have you changed their name and their pronouns, and are you treating them as a boy instead of a girl?
In both cases, the teachers and principles said, No, we would never do that. We haven’t done that. Years went by, and, in both cases, the two children had severe mental health crises that resulted in hospitalization and suicide attempts.
The parents discovered upon the hospitalization of their kids that the schools actually had lied to their faces. Their children had been transitioned socially and were being treated as the opposite of their biological sex—girls being treated as boys. Teachers had actively worked to conceal this from the parents throughout years of parent-teacher conferences. They did false paperwork so the parents wouldn’t catch on and then refused to answer questions, stonewalled, or lied when the parents asked the question.
The California law actually required school districts statewide to engage in this pattern of concealment from parents unless a student affirmatively told the school, I want you to tell my parents about my experience of gender incongruence, about the fact that I’m using different pronouns and a different name at school, that I’m going to the boys’ bathroom instead of the girls’ bathroom.
Because the California law required the school districts to conceal actively from parents, the parents sued to challenge that law. They proceeded along with two Catholic teachers who said, We have a religious obligation to be truthful and to not lie in our jobs.
There was a lengthy trial proceeding with expert witnesses from both sides and testimony from the parents, families, and administrators. In December 2025, the district court judge ruled in favor of the parents and the teachers and issued an injunction that said California could no longer enforce this law. After this injunction, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals tried to pause the ruling and allow California to continue its concealment practices while the case went on. Federal court cases can take years to complete.
The parents and the teachers went to the Supreme Court and asked for the policy to be paused while the lawsuit continued. The Supreme Court, unusually, reached out and agreed. In that 6-3 decision, they said, We think this is outrageous, and we’re not going to let California keep parents in the dark while this case is litigated.
What argument does California make for why concealment is necessary?
On the legal side, one of their primary arguments was that children have a constitutional right to privacy under the California constitution, and the state needs to protect children’s right to privacy from their own parents. The district court and the US Supreme Court rejected that argument. The supremacy clause in the US Constitution overrides a contrary state law. Even if the contrary state law is very popular back home, the federal Bill of Rights controls. That’s why Jim Crow was overturned.
California doesn’t think they’re doing evil or harm here. They say they are motivated by a concern to avoid child abuse. The state has said throughout that they do not want children who disclose to their parents that they are feeling gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, that they want to transition, to face child abuse at home. It is important and legitimate that the state is concerned about avoiding child abuse.
The US Supreme Court said that, while their concern was fair, the state has an entire child abuse enforcement system in place to adjudicate cases of genuine child abuse. All teachers are still mandatory reporters who can report potential abuse through the right channels for proper investigation and, if substantiated, for child abuse charges. There’s a whole process for protecting the child while protecting the integrity of the family, seeking changes in the family, and eventual reunification if that’s possible or removal if it’s not.
The Supreme Court took great pains to say those processes still apply. California still has all of those tools because the state does have a legitimate and important interest in preventing child abuse. But what the court did say was that the state can’t presume that parents will abuse their children and therefore protect them from their parents.
The Catholic parents in this case testified that their beliefs prevented them from letting their children go through social transition. They said they would get their children counseling and help and support them. They would show them love and acceptance but would not facilitate their gender transition. The court below and the Supreme Court found that that is not child abuse—that the parent has a fundamental right to raise their child in their faith and the state may not knowingly and deliberately interfere with a parent’s efforts to raise their child in the faith.
That’s a really important thing for Christian parents to hear out of this decision. There are ways to be a loving parent that do not involve facilitating a gender transition when you believe, as a Christian parent, that is not in the best interest of your child.
The district court said in its ruling for the parents that, if parents didn’t know what was going on, they couldn’t help their child. All the experts agree that kids whose parents are working together with their therapists to address their problems do much better than kids whose parents are not working with their therapists. Unless parents are involved, the child is essentially left on their own. Schools cannot arrange therapeutic intervention on their own; parents need to be involved. Concealment doesn’t serve the child’s interest on any level.
Is this concealment by school districts happening in other places beyond California?
This is happening nationwide. Around 2016, right at the end of the Obama administration, these policies started to be rolled out and recommended by advocacy groups as the gold standard for accommodation for transgender students. They were often introduced with nondiscrimination policies. Schools could not discriminate against students on the basis of their transgender status. If the student asked you to, you concealed their social gender transition from their parents. If the student and their parents disagreed about transition, you sided with the kids over their parents’ objections. Those policies have been around for 10 years, and estimates say about 1,200 school districts have them. Some are imposed at the state level.
How would parents know that’s going on in their particular school district?
You could look up rights for transgender students in your district. You could go in and talk to your kid’s teachers. If you have a good relationship with teachers or administrators, you can say, “What do you do in these situations?” And you can put them on notice. You can say, “I really care about my kid. I want to get them all the help that I can, so I really want you to let me know if my kid is expressing discomfort with their gender identity and wanting to transition. Please tell me.” You can bring it up in parent-teacher conferences if you feel comfortable, reminding them that you are your kid’s best advocate. You are the one who knows your kid best and loves your kid best. You can do it in a winsome way, but you can also do it knowing that the law is on your side.
Parents have the right and the duty to raise their children in the way they see fit. The Supreme Court case law here goes back a hundred years. That’s a fundamental constitutional right, and that overrides your school district’s policies. Any school district officials that now continue to conceal gender transitions from parents are in violation of clearly established constitutional law. It means they’re personally liable for monetary damages.
We want a pluralistic society. That’s what it means to be an American. What is the limiting principle for how our education system should address these ideologies as they emerge in our culture?
The Mirabelli case went back to 100-year-old case law that existed at the height of American xenophobia, where Nebraska tried to enact laws that banned German Lutherans from having Bible classes in German, in their parochial Lutheran schools, and Oregon tried to outlaw Catholic schools. Both laws were designed to shore up support for the nascent public school system, but they required you to send your kids to public schools only. The Supreme Court said 100 years ago that the child is not the mere creature of the state. It is their parents who have the responsibility, the right, the high duty to prepare them for their future life and their responsibilities.
Those principles are still true today, and they apply in the most contentious questions that educators and parents are dealing with today. Parents are still the primary educators of their kids, and the public schools do not have the right to deliberately interfere with parents’ efforts to bring their kids up. This is important for Christians, but it’s even more important for members of religious minorities.
Protestant parents who do not wish to have their child enrolled any longer in a public school may find a Protestant school nearby. It may not be ideal. It may be costly, but you may also have a homeschool co-op nearby that you can join or a private school you can go to. You shouldn’t have to do this, to be clear, but there are options out there.
If you’re a Muslim parent in Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, there are no good options for you other than sending your kid to a religious school that’s not your faith. If you’re the parent of a disabled child who needs a lot of special support, there aren’t good options for you outside of the public school system.
When Christian parents step up and say, This is woven into our constitution, and you can’t take this away from us, it actually has an umbrella effect. Our advocacy advances the common good for our Muslim neighbors and for others who are, for some reason, locked into the public system and don’t have a way out.
