A federal judge in California delivered an unqualified victory for common sense last Monday when he struck down the state’s school secrecy policy, which required school officials to lie to parents about their child’s gender identity. “Parents have a right to receive gender information,” ruled Judge Roger Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee in the Southern District of California, “and teachers have a right to provide to parents accurate information about a child’s gender identity.”

The case (Mirabelli v. Olson) arose after two Christian teachers in Escondido Unified School District (USD) challenged a district policy requiring them to conceal a student’s gender transition from the child’s parents, unless the child explicitly said his or her parents could be told.

Local officials claimed the policy was required by state regulations, citing a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page published by the California Department of Education (CDE). The CDE claims the school secrecy requirement implements a provision in the California constitution recognizing an inalienable right to privacy, as well as state laws prohibiting “discrimination on the basis of … gender, gender identity, [and] gender expression.”

In September 2023, Benitez issued a preliminary injunction against Escondido USD and the state of California, finding that “parental involvement is essential to the healthy maturation of schoolchildren” and that the school secrecy policy caused a “trifecta of harm.”

Before the full trial, the case expanded to a class action lawsuit including both other teachers and Christian parents whose children had suffered as the result of California’s school secrecy policy.

Meanwhile, California officials continued to expand gender ideology through state law and policy. The California legislature enacted AB 1955, which banned local school districts from implementing policies requiring parental notification of a student’s gender identity. In place of the controversial FAQ page, the CDE rolled out a multi-part “cultural competency training” for educators on “Providing Relevant, Inclusive Support that Matters [PRISM] for LGBTQ+ Students,” which issued the same instructions against parental notification.

At first, California lawyers tried to argue that the Mirabelli lawsuit should be considered moot because the offending FAQ page was removed, suggesting that the state’s policies have changed. However, Judge Benitez noted with frustration that state officials “declined to enter into a consent judgment binding themselves and their successors in office” from enforcing a school secrecy policy. Instead, “when faced with the presence of fresh statements of the parental exclusion policies in a newly state-published cultural competency training program called PRISM, the State Defendants have formally withdrawn their claim that the case is moot.”

In a December 22, 2025 order, Benitez replaced the preliminary injunction with a permanent injunction, basing his reasoning primarily on the supremacy of the federal Constitution. “The state bases its legal position on a derogation of the parents’ federal constitutional right to care for and raise their children and an unwarranted aggrandizing of a student’s state-created right to privacy. … They misapprehend the supremacy of federal constitutional rights,” he wrote. “Where state-created rights run headlong into federal constitutional rights, federal rights are supreme.”

The injunction prevents state officials from enforcing any provision or policy that would “permit or require any employee in the California state-wide education system from misleading the parent or guardian of a minor child … about their child’s gender presentation at school, whether by: (i) directly lying to the parent; (ii) preventing the parent from accessing educational records of the child; or (iii) using a different set of preferred pronouns/names when speaking with the parents than is being used at school.”

The permanent injunction also blocks any state policy that would “permit or require any employee in the California state-wide education system to use a name or pronoun to refer to that child that do not match the child’s legal name and natal pronouns,” over either the parent’s expressed objection or “the employee’s conscientious or religious objection.” In fact, it blocks any policy that would “in any way interfere with a teacher or other school … staff from communicating to parents that his, her, or their child has manifested a form of gender incongruity.”

Finally, the injunction required state officials to include a disclaimer “in a prominent place in PRISM training materials, and in any other state-created or approved instruction on the gender-related rights of student and faculty.” The court-mandated statement reads:

“Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.”

“When it comes to a student’s change in gender identity, California state policymakers apparently do not trust parents to do the right thing for their child. So, the state purposefully interferes with a parent’s access to meaningful information about their child’s gender identity choices,” the judge wrote. “The State Defendants explain that these policies are needed to prevent bullying and harassment. Preventing student bullying and harassment in school is a laudable goal. The problem is that the parent exclusion policies seem to presume that it is the parents that will be the harassers from whom students need to be protected.”

The court noted that this far-fetched fear is rarely realized, as even parents who disagree with their child’s gender identity still love them. “Even the defense experts agree that parental disagreement is a valid reaction,” Benitez wrote. “Disagreement is not abuse, and the court so finds. In contrast, adolescent social transitioning without parents usually results in serious problems for the adolescent.”

These problems may not become apparent during the adolescent years during which the state has an interest in the child’s education, the judge reasoned, but that only provides all the more reason to entrust parents with the child’s welfare. “The difficult and long lasting issues of gender nonconformity leave parents to suffer adverse consequences over a lifetime,” said Benitez. “The State Defendants, on the other hand, have no personal investment in a student’s health and the State Defendants will not be exposed to a lifetime of a student’s mental health issues. Instead, that will be the parents’ grief to bear alone.”

Benitez concluded his opinion by reiterating his assessment that “parental exclusion policies create a trifecta of harm”:

“They harm the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. They harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children, and by substantially burdening many parents’ First Amendment right to train their children in their sincerely held religious beliefs And finally, they harm teachers who are compelled to violate the sincerely held beliefs and the parent’s rights by forcing them to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students.”

The ACLU condemned the ruling as unfair to students who identify as LGBT. “This case is part of a nationwide, coordinated attack on trans people and all those who stand up for trans youth,” lamented Christine Parker, senior staff attorney with the Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. “A culture of outing harms everyone — students, families, and school staff alike — by removing opportunities to build trust. LGBTQ+ students deserve to decide on their own terms if, when, and how to come out, and to be able to be themselves at school.”

In many legal scenarios, judges will pause the implementation of their ruling with a judicial stay while the case is appealed. Remarkably, however, Benitez refused to issue such a stay in this case. In a December 23 follow-up order, he denied a state request for either a 14-day administrative stay, or a stay pending appeal. California complained that Benitez’s ruling would “irrevocably alter the status quo and will create chaos and confusion among students, parents, teachers, and staff at California’s public schools.”

However, Benitez countered that his order did not overturn a longstanding provision, as “there had been no prohibition against teachers speaking to parents about their child’s gender incongruity” before the CDE issued its infamous FAQs, and that in any case he did not “hold any law to be Unconstitutional.” Instead, “What this Court’s order does is to clear up confusion caused by the State Defendants, beginning with the FAQs. … In short, this Court’s order preserves what most parents and government actors have honored, acknowledged, and protected for decades, if not centuries.”

Once again, Benitez expressed his frustration with California’s squirrelly argumentation. “The Court has given the State plenty of opportunity and time to provide evidence that demonstrates that State law does not run afoul of the Federal Constitution. Instead, the State argues that the State Constitution supersedes the Federal Constitution.”

The class action lawsuit grants a reprieve to Christian teachers and parents in progressive California school districts, whose constitutional rights to free speech, free religious expression, and parental direction of their child’s health care suffered most at the hands of the school secrecy policies.

As Benitez said, his order does not strike down any law, including AB 1955, California’s ban on policies requiring parental notification. However, his injunction requiring parental notification will likely complicate efforts by California and progressive activists to eliminate such local policies. Already, a California judge in Riverside County refused to block such a policy in a February 2024 decision.

One indirect beneficiary of the Mirabelli decision may be the California taxpayer, who has been forced to pay multiple, six-figure settlements to Christian parents and teachers who suffered under the parental secrecy policy and the ambiguity it created. Benitez’s order forces California to clarify that hiding a students’ gender identity from parents is constitutionally impermissible, and neither parents nor teachers will be forced to abide by this ideologically driven agenda.