Mirabelli v. Bonta forces California public schools to disclose student gender identities

On March 2, 2026, in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Supreme Court blocked California state policy requiring schools to withhold a student’s gender identity without consent. The court had to decide between maintaining California’s current privacy laws or extending parents’ rights to control their children. 

The case originated in 2023 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. The plaintiffs were Elizabeth Mirabelli, a middle school teacher, and many California school parents, who sued for the right to know their students’ gender identities. Two plaintiff parents, officially listed as John and Jane Poe, religiously opposed gender transitioning, and their daughter presented herself as male, resulting in a suicide attempt, gender dysphoria, and involuntary hospitalization, resulting in the parents placing her in psychiatric therapy. 

Meanwhile, the defendants were Rob Bonta, Attorney General of California, and California education officials such as Tony Thurmond, the State Superintendent. District Court Judge Roger Benitez ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 2025, claiming teachers could inform parents about gender identity due to freedom of speech under the 1st Amendment. An appeals court temporarily paused the order, but the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court.  

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs 6-3. The six conservative justices ruled in the majority, while the three liberal justices dissented. In the majority opinion, parents  “have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs.” The ruling claimed California laws violated the parents’ rights. 

On the other hand, the dissenting opinion criticized the court’s rushed decision, claiming the court “receives scant and, frankly, inadequate briefing about the legal issues in dispute. It does not hold oral argument or deliberate in conference, as regular procedures dictate. It considers the request on a short fuse—a matter of weeks.”

For California, the ruling, under the 1st Amendment’s freedom of speech and freedom of religion right, allows all public school teachers to share students’ pronouns with parents whenever requested. According to Benitez’s ruling, teachers are prevented from “directly lying to the parent, preventing the parent from accessing educational records of the child, or using a different set of preferred pronouns/names when speaking with the parents than is being used at school.” 

LGBTQ rights activists criticized the decision. Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, noted that the decision forces teachers to disclose gender identity “even where the evidentiary record shows that disclosure threatens significant psychological, emotional, and physical harm.”

While the Court’s decision only affects California public schools, it’s significant to the rest of the nation because similar cases in other states may be influenced by Mirabelli v. Bonta. The Supreme Court frequently refers to past cases to support its current decisions, and when courts also consider the 1st Amendment, many gender privacy laws may be overturned in the future.