Key Points

  • SCOTUS vacated the Ninth Circuit's stay as to parent plaintiffs, reinstating the district court's injunction against California's nondisclosure and pronoun-compliance policies pending appeal.
  • The Court found parents likely to succeed on both Free Exercise (citing Yoder and Mahmoud v. Taylor) and substantive due process (citing Meyer, Pierce, Parham) grounds; the stay as to teacher plaintiffs remains in place.
  • A concurrence defends reliance on substantive due process post-Dobbs and justifies issuing a reasoned per curiam on the emergency docket.
  • A dissent faults the Court for bypassing ordinary merits-docket procedures and pending certiorari petitions raising the same issue.

The Supreme Court on March 2 vacated a Ninth Circuit stay that had frozen a district court injunction barring California schools from concealing students' gender transitions from parents and from compelling teachers to use preferred names and pronouns over parental objection. The per curiam order grants relief to the parent plaintiffs while leaving the stay in place as to the teacher plaintiffs.

The dispute traces to a 2023 suit filed in the Southern District of California by two teachers seeking an exemption from their district's gender-identity policies. Parents later joined as plaintiffs, alleging the district's rules—later formalized in a state training curriculum—barred school staff from telling parents about a child's in-school gender transition unless the child consented.

The record described two families' experiences. Parents identified as the Poes said they learned only after their daughter's hospitalization for a suicide attempt that she had been presenting as a boy at school; staff had not disclosed this despite parent-teacher meetings. A second family, the Does, said a principal told them state law barred disclosure without their daughter's consent, prompting them to transfer schools.

After certifying subclasses of parents and teachers, the district court granted summary judgment for all plaintiffs and entered a permanent injunction barring schools from 'misleading' parents about their children's gender presentation and requiring schools to follow parental direction on names and pronouns. The Ninth Circuit stayed that injunction pending appeal, questioning both the class certification under Rule 23 and the merits, and characterizing the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor as narrowly confined to curricular requirements.

The per curiam opinion disagreed, applying the four-factor stay standard from Nken v. Holder. The Court concluded that parents seeking religious exemptions are likely to succeed on their Free Exercise Clause claim because California's nondisclosure policy 'substantially interfere[s]' with the right of parents to guide their children's religious upbringing, triggering strict scrutiny under Wisconsin v. Yoder and Mahmoud.

the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights here—unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition—is greater than the introduction of LGBTQ storybooks we considered sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny in Mahmoud.

The Court also found the state's asserted interest in safety and privacy insufficiently narrowly tailored, noting that 'those policies cut out the primary protectors of children's best interests: their parents,' citing Troxel v. Granville, and suggesting a policy permitting religious exemptions while still allowing intervention in cases of suspected abuse could serve the state's interest with less burden on parental rights.

On the due process claim, the Court invoked Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and Parham v. J.R., holding that parents have a right not to be excluded from decisions concerning their children's mental health, and that gender dysphoria bears directly on that interest.

These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

Turning to irreparable harm and the equities, the Court found that denial of constitutional rights during a protracted appeal itself constitutes irreparable injury, and rejected the Ninth Circuit's procedural objections—ruling that the parents covered by the injunction likely have standing as direct objects of the challenged policies and that class certification was likely proper.

A concurrence defended resting relief on substantive due process notwithstanding the doctrine's controversy, explaining that the Glucksberg 'deeply rooted' framework, not Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, governs parental-rights precedent, and that Dobbs 'calls into question neither the doctrine of substantive due process nor the other unexpressed rights that the doctrine protects.'

The same concurrence also defended the decision to issue a reasoned per curiam rather than a bare order, writing that '[i]nterim applications routinely require the Court to balance the lock-in risk of saying too much against the transparency cost of saying too little' and that explanation was warranted because lower courts had misread Mahmoud.

A dissent criticized the Court for resolving the application on the emergency docket while a materially similar case, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, sat on the certiorari docket, and while the Ninth Circuit's own en banc reconsideration process was still underway. The dissent argued the Court effectively issued 'a conclusive merits judgment' despite qualifying its findings as merely 'likely.'

Our processes are, in short, the hallmark of judicial probity, and alike its guarantor. There was no reason to abandon them here.

The dissent further noted tension between recognizing a parental due process right here and the Court's rejection of a due process-based right in Dobbs, and observed that the Court had declined to consider an analogous substantive due process claim when it granted certiorari in United States v. Skrmetti.

Two justices indicated they would have granted the application in full, extending relief to teachers as well; another justice indicated a preference to deny it in full.