Supreme Court sides with parents in trans fight

What happened

A divided Supreme Court Monday temporarily blocked California from enforcing policies that discourage public school teachers from outing transgender students to their parents without consent. The unsigned order said the parents who sued California were likely to prove the policies violated their religious and parental rights. The three liberal justices publicly dissented, criticizing their “impatient” conservative colleagues for using “shortcut procedures on the emergency docket” to rush out a “terse, tonally dismissive ruling designed to conclusively resolve“ the thorny legal dispute without a hearing.

In a second emergency-docket ruling Monday, the Supreme Court paused a New York federal judge’s order to redraw the lone Republican-held congressional district in New York City, keeping the seat’s GOP lean for the midterm elections. The three liberals also dissented in that case.

Who said what

The transgender case is “rooted in a 2024 California law that prohibits school districts from requiring staff to inform parents about a student’s gender identity without the child’s permission,” Politico said. A federal judge blocked that law in December and barred “school employees statewide from using new names and pronouns for students if their parents objected,” The Wall Street Journal said. A U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel then blocked that ruling, calling it overly broad and a misreading of state policy.

The Thomas More Society, the conservative legal group representing the parents, called the Supreme Court’s revival of the judge’s ban the “most significant parental rights ruling in a generation.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) office said the order “undermines student privacy” at the expense of their education and turns teachers into “gender cops.”

What next?

This was the “latest clash over transgender issues to reach the high court,” The Washington Post said. In two argued cases earlier this term, the court “seemed inclined” to uphold state bans on trans women playing women’s sports and “appeared skeptical of a Colorado ban on conversion therapy for gay and trans minors.”