California often portrays itself as leading the nation on important liberal policy issues, from authorizing same-sex marriage over the will of voters to utilizing its massive population to set de facto national environmental standards that are stricter than federal policies.Now it’s getting dragged into teeing up a national standard for public schools’ obligations to employees and parents when it comes to students expressing “gender incongruence” on campus, thanks to a two-and-a-half-year-old class action lawsuit and petitions to the Supreme Court to review similar policies in Massachusetts, Florida and just this week Maine.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, repeatedly slurred by name by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom for other rulings, granted summary judgment to parents and teachers against the state’s so-called gender secrecy policies, which allegedly conceal from parents their children’s gender identity at odds with sex, including by muzzling employees.
The President George W. Bush nominee approved their motion for a class-wide permanent injunction, two months after certifying a class and four subclasses and a month after threatening to sanction officials for “misleading” Benitez by falsely claiming the state was no longer enforcing gender-secrecy policies so that he would moot the case.
He has consistently ruled against the Golden State, citing the “significant, adverse, life-long social-emotional health consequences” that can flow from social transitioning in denying motions to dismiss nearly a year ago.
The injunction applies to Attorney General Rob Bonta, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond and State Board of Education members, prohibiting them from using the state constitution, statutes, “regulations or guidance” or the “newly produced PRISM cultural competency training” to mislead parents about their children’s “gender presentation at school.”
It also bans them from using children’s preferred names and gender pronouns that “do not match the child’s legal name and natal pronouns” when the parent “has communicated their objection to such use.”
Finally, the injunction stops state officials from overriding an “employee’s conscientious or religious objection” to using students’ preferred names and pronouns “while concealing that social gender transition” from parents, and from interfering when employees seek to tell parents that their children have “manifested a form of gender incongruity.”
Benitez also ordered officials to put a parental-rights statement in a “prominent place” on any “state-created or approved instruction on the gender-related rights of student and faculty,” including PRISM materials.
It says they have a “federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence” and that teachers and staff have the same right to “accurately inform” parents of this. These federal rights overrule state and local laws, regulations and policies “to the contrary,” the statement concludes.
Bonta botched his “legal constructs” by arguing that the plaintiffs are asking California to “magnanimously permit a sort of federal constitutional exemption,” Benitez wrote, paraphrasing Bonta’s argument. Rather, they seek to force the state to “respect their enduring federal constitutional rights as citizens of the United States,” the judge said.
“California’s education policymakers may be experts on primary and secondary education but they would not receive top grades as students of Constitutional Law,” Benitez said, implying that by defending “an unwarranted aggrandizing of a student’s state-created right to privacy,” Bonta had raised doubts about his own competence as a lawyer.
Bonta’s office has already filed an appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and “will also be requesting that the Ninth Circuit stay the district court’s injunction pending that appeal,” a spokesperson for the office wrote in an email.
“We are committed to securing school environments that allow transgender students to safely participate as their authentic selves while recognizing the important role that parents play in students’ lives,” the spokesperson said.
The California Department of Education, which Thurmond leads, declined to comment on “pending litigation” when asked for its response to the ruling, the injunction’s conditions and the reasoning of Benitez.
“This victory is not just ours,” teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, the original plaintiffs, said in a statement distributed by their lawyers at the Thomas More Society. “It is a win for honesty, transparency, and the fundamental rights of teachers and parents.”
Subsequent plaintiffs, teachers and parents, used pseudonyms due to the “severe harassment and retaliation” faced by Mirabelli and West, TMS said. “They never sought to be the face of this fight, yet their courage has transformed the lives of families and educators not only in California but perhaps the entire country,” Executive Vice President Peter Breen said.
Special counsel Paul Jonna warned that state and local officials who continue to enforce the policies, as California allegedly did by moving the requirements to the secret PRISM training from a public FAQ page after it got sued, will “face severe legal consequences.”
The Liberty Justice Center praised the ruling for “its clarity and its rejection of the state’s framing” and cited its own work to “stop this model in California before it spreads nationally” and “reestablish durable constitutional limits on the role of the state in family life.”
Bonta missed the legal deadline to appeal a ruling for LJC’s client, Chino Valley Unified School District, that upheld the constitutionality of its parental notification policy when students request to change their official or unofficial school records. Chino Valley is now suing to block California’s AB 1955, which claims “existing law” prohibits parental notification.
