On March 2nd, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mirabelli v. Bonta that California public schools cannot hide the gender transitioning of children from their parents. The justices overturned the stay of the permanent injunction by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing the lower court action to proceed. In a press release celebrating the victory, the Thomas More Society called the decision “groundbreaking,” holding that “secret gender transition policies in schools violate the religious liberty and due process rights of parents.”

The Supreme Court left standing a decision by U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez, who ruled in favor of teacher and parent plaintiffs objecting to the state’s disregard for the rights of parents. At issue was the California Department of Education’s “guidance” that forces teachers to treat children in accordance with their preferred gender, “even lying to the parents if necessary.”

WorldNetDaily reported that the original lawsuit was brought by “teachers who expected to be punished if they refused to lie about a student’s gender identity.” Parents in the Escondido Union School District joined the action in opposition to the education department’s agenda.

Benitez said the California Attorney General, speaking on behalf of the state, claimed the plaintiffs’ lawsuit was “properly understood as seeking a federal constitutional exemption from the California constitutional right to privacy, as applied to gender identity in the school context.” But the judge pointed out that the attorney general got it “upside down,” that the plaintiffs were not asking the state “to magnanimously permit a sort of federal constitutional exemption. What plaintiffs seek is to force the state to respect their enduring federal constitutional rights as citizens of the United States.”

According to WorldNetDaily, the trigger for the case “was a young girl indoctrinated by school teachings into transgenderism. Her parents only found out about the agenda when she tried to commit suicide.” The notoriously liberal Ninth U.S. put Judge Benitez’s sensible ruling on hold. But that ruling is now reversed at least for now by the highest court in the land.

Accomplished lawyer and President of Eagle Forum Education and Legal, Molly McCann Sanders, shared her thoughts on social media immediately following the ruling. “The U.S. Supreme Court made a wonderful decision with respect to parental rights,” she said. “While the California case is being litigated through the lower courts, the Supreme Court has ruled that parents must be informed if their children are attempting to transition at school.”

Sanders continued: “The reason this ruling is so great is that it’s a question of who decides. It’s very clear that California schools believe the government, the schools, and the teachers should decide what’s best for children, and the Supreme Court says ‘no, parents are closest to their children. They are the ones who have the ability to keep their children safe and to help their children navigate these very important issues.’”

She further explained that when a court imposes or lifts an injunction, it considers the likelihood of success on merits. In other words, the parent plaintiffs are likely to succeed when the case is considered on its merits as it makes its way up through the appellate process. “Whenever the court reiterates that parents have a fundamental right to direct their child’s education, religious upbringing, or whatever the case may be,” Sanders said, “it strengthens parental rights across the board, and that’s a major victory for all of us.”

Although the Supreme Court’s ruling stems from a case in California, it has broad implications for all 50 states. Thomas More Society special counsel, Paul Jonna, said: “The court’s landmark reaffirmation of substantive due process, its vindication of religious liberty, and its approval of class-wide relief together set a historic precedent that will dismantle secret gender transition policies across the country.”

Collapsing ideology?

This ruling by the high court is the latest blow to the bizarre and scientifically flawed cult of transgenderism, which of late has been showing signs it may soon go on life support. While it may be too late for many surgically and chemically mutilated young victims, thousands more will be spared if this ideological scourge fades away.

On March 3, an article by The Dispatch described what it called “the first-of-its-kind payout to a detransitioner, Fox Varian, who was awarded $2 million in damages earlier this year by a New York jury.” A detransitioner is a person who underwent a gender transition while still underage and later, typically as a young adult, realizes the mistake and attempts to restore his or her biological sex. Varian underwent “a double mastectomy as a 16-year-old—despite a complex psychiatric profile, troubling family history, and indicators of broader identity instability.”

According to media accounts, Varian’s psychological issues likely contributed to her gender dysphoria, but for years the questionable pediatric gender “medicine” guidelines of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) have prevailed, causing untold harm. (See Education Reporter, December 2024 and November 2022.)

The Dispatch reported that while WPATH claimed the Varian case was about medical malpractice “not a referendum on gender-affirming care,” the organization’s standards of care “are shot through with contested, and at times, irreconcilable assumptions about the immutability of trans identities, and the relationship between these identities and mental health issues.” The article adds that WPATH’s focus on “honoring patient identities and ‘goals’ essentially ensures that the clinical decision-making tree always ends in affirmation.” In other words, WPATH typically recommends affirming the wishes of the child, who may be suffering from a variety of emotional and/or psychological ills.

As The Dispatch article makes clear:

• The affirmative model’s commitment to uncritically affirming all identity claims helps explain how you end up with high-profile detransitioner malpractice suits—Fox Varian, Soren Aldaco, Chloe Cole, Prisha Mosley, Luka Hein and Isabelle Ayala, among others. Many of these complaints fit a common pattern, often involving highly complex clinical cases that feature multiple psychiatric and developmental issues taking place within challenging family contexts—exactly the kind of cases which would signal to any experienced clinician the need for caution and delayed decision making....

ASPS issues statement

Almost in tandem with the Varian verdict, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) announced in a February 3 Position Statement its recommendation “that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.” (See Education Reporter, February 2026.)

While the ASPS is the first and only major medical association to so far issue such a statement, it is nonetheless significant, and many observers hope others will follow. Meanwhile, the Society for Evidence based Gender Medicine (SEGM), founded in 2020, states on its website that it was formed “in response to a proliferation of treatment guidelines that promote medicalized youth gender transition without the benefit of systematic reviews of evidence.”

SEGM laments that “prevailing guidelines rely on a limited selection of studies that suffer from a high risk of bias, and have low applicability to the current population of gender-dysphoric youth. Such non-evidence-based guidelines risk promoting suboptimal and harmful care.” This organization appears to inject a dose of sanity into the mad world of transgender ideology posing as “medicine.”

Last September, an opinion piece by Alleigh Marré, executive director of the American Parents Coalition, appeared in the liberal mainstream USA Today. Marré contended that media attention focusing on biological males using girls’ bathrooms and invading girls’ sports was obscuring the fact that parents are not being told the truth by their public-school teachers and administrators. She wrote in part:

• Missing in the loudest narratives are the voices of parents kept in the dark when school officials secretly transitioned their children, depriving these kids of counsel from those who love them most.... Missing are the testimonies of anguished young adults who say they were rushed into life-altering decisions they now regret.... Across the country, schools have adopted policies allowing children to “socially transition,” often with new names and pronouns, without informing their parents.

Marré continued: “Activist administrators and educators use these policies to insert themselves between parent and child, positioning themselves as the authority on a major issue affecting the child’s mental and physical health.” She emphasized the oft-repeated mantra that schools merely want to keep kids “safe” from parents who may not agree with the child’s whim, which schools then use as a license “to transition children in secret.”

But many parents and concerned citizens are hoping that recent developments, most pivotal of which is the pro-parent decision the U.S. Supreme Court just handed down, will put an end to the transgender madness that has gripped the country for too many years.

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