Sanity reigns again at the Supreme Court. It is a mark of the scarcity of sanity that it took the nation’s highest court — and only six of its nine justices, at that — to say that parents have a right to know if schoolteachers are propagandizing or practicing medicine on their kids in secret, even if those secrets risk driving the children to suicide.
The facts in Mirabelli v. Bonta are shocking, but all too common. California law led schools to adopt a gag rule policy of not informing parents that their child, as early as in fifth grade, was “gender transitioning” in school. Two sets of parents who found out what was happening to their children sued. In one case, parents with a religious objection to transitioning only discovered the school’s subterfuge after their daughter attempted suicide and was hospitalized.
California authorities dissembled when sued, claiming that the school policies had been altered and the lawsuits were moot, but eventually admitted that the issue was state law, and the new policies would similarly deceive parents. So heavy-handed is the state that in 2023, it sued a school district for not complying with the gag rule policy.
The parents challenging the gag rule, relying on Supreme Court doctrines on parental rights that have been settled for a century, won their case on a full evidentiary record in a federal trial court and got a permanent injunction. But sanity was short-lived. The Ninth Circuit stayed the injunction, allowing the policy and its abuse of parental rights to go forward while the litigation dragged on. The Supreme Court, in reinstating the injunction, cited its 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that schools could not mandate the teaching of storybooks with “LGBTQ+-inclusive” messages when parents object. The Court in Mirabelli noted that “the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights here — unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition — is greater than the introduction of LGBTQ storybooks” at issue in Mahmoud. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s concurring opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, argued that the Court had to step in quickly because the Ninth Circuit and other resistant circuit courts “significantly misunderstood” Mahmoud.
It is difficult to imagine any other scenario in which a school, or really any state agency, would be justified in hiding the medical or psychological conditions of minor children from their parents. As the Court observed, California “argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy. But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.” California’s position is the reductio ad absurdum of the progressive default assumption that all children are wards of the state, and that the mediating role of parents between state and child is at most a tolerated necessity in that relationship.
Even on California’s terms, consider a parent who means well, but may not be trusted by the state to provide proper treatment for a medical or psychological condition. That parent, acting in good faith, may still make the situation worse — especially in dealing with mental-health issues — simply out of ignorance of the child’s problem. Deliberately concealing the child’s condition from parents can only mean that the real fear here is that parents will object to what schools are doing to minor children without parental consent and stop it.
At a deeper level, the shell game played in the courts by defenders of these kinds of school policies is revealing. Is gender dysphoria a medical condition that threatens a child’s health and presents an elevated risk of suicide if untreated, requiring frequent resort to drugs and drastic medical procedures? When advancing these policies, we hear a lot of odes to safety and the importance of deferring to medical expertise. In United States v. Skrmetti, the pro-transgender side claimed that “gender-affirming” drugs were a necessary medical treatment. In Chiles v. Salazar, they argue that simply talking to consenting kids with their parents’ permission about gender confusion is the practice of medicine the state can regulate — if it involves talking kids out of transitioning. In West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, they argue that even telling men from women for athletic competitions should require testosterone testing.
Or is gender fluidity an ideological point of view? In Mahmoud, they argued that books with a normative point of view were just describing the existence of gay and transgender people. In Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, the First Circuit defended a policy similar to California’s by claiming that reclassifying minors to a new sex in how they are identified at school is not medical, because such policies “do not involve clinical conduct at all.” Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting in Mirabelli, referred to the California policy as addressing children’s “life choices.” But if this is not a medical problem, what justifies treating it as a safety issue to be concealed from parents? What arms Colorado to regulate speech alone as the practice of medicine, while speech on the same subject from the opposite viewpoint is not?
The ugly reality in each of these cases is that state authorities are grooming children into a particular view of sex, gender, and sexuality. For this to work, it requires that parents be kept in the dark so that the child cannot hear a contrary message to what authority figures are pressing upon their young, impressionable minds. Parents have every right both to know this and to put a stop to it.
Of course, there may be specific situations where a child needs state protection from abusive parents, and this can be the case for gender-confused kids as it may with kids facing any number of medical or sexual situations. The justices acknowledged that: Their resolution of the case still “permits the State to shield children from unfit parents by enforcing child-abuse laws and removing children from parental custody in appropriate cases.” But there is an entire body of law and courts to deal with those specific situations, and parents who are threatened with the loss of parental rights on such grounds are entitled to due process of law. California treats all parents as presumptive abusers, and by not telling them what the state does to their children, it strips them of all due process — while allowing real abuses to be conducted in secret by ideological zealots. That’s not just insanity — it is also tyranny.