Advocates Fear Supreme Court Is ‘Going After the Transgender Community Deliberately’

An emergency Supreme Court ruling to temporarily bar California from enforcing a state law that prevents public schools from outing transgender students has advocates raising concerns about its potential to further roll back protections for transgender youth.

The court’s conservative majority on Monday sided with a group of Christian parents who alleged that the law violates their religious and due process rights.

The decision comes as the court also considers this spring whether to bar transgender girls from participating in public school sports and strike down a law banning conversion therapy for minors in Colorado. Last year, the court upheld a law barring some gender-affirming care for minors.

“This is the fifth anti-trans decision that the Supreme Court has done,” said Jorge Reyes Salinas, the communications director for Equality California. “It is disappointing, and it is alarming that the Supreme Court has chosen to do this and once again disregard the safety and well-being and privacy of transgender people, specifically transgender youth.

“It is very clear to the American people that the Supreme Court is going after the transgender community deliberately,” he continued.

The California law in question, enacted in 2024, prevents schools from automatically fulfilling parents’ requests for information if their child changes their pronouns or gender expression at school. This week’s ruling blocks the state from enforcing the law as it is challenged in lower courts.

In 2024, a group of parents and teachers opposed the policy in District Court, and in December, a federal judge ruled that school officials cannot withhold such information about students if parents request it.

Last month, a three-judge panel of appellate judges temporarily blocked that District Court order pending a challenge by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who said the lower court misunderstood state law. He said it is “far from categorically forbidding disclosure of information about students’ gender identities to parents,” and that it allows, and in some cases requires, disclosure when there is a risk of serious harm to a student.

Bonta has also argued that violating students’ “reasonable expectation of privacy” by disclosing information without their consent is a form of sex discrimination violating the state Equal Protection Clause.

The appellate panel sided with Bonta in a preliminary ruling, temporarily blocking the lower court’s decision.

Heron Greenesmith, the deputy director of policy for the Transgender Law Center, said the Supreme Court’s decision to halt enforcement of the law prevents schools from ensuring that students are safe.

“School districts can go ahead and enact policies saying that students must be outed to people in their life, regardless of safety, moving forward,” they told KQED. “Trans youth deserve autonomy, trans youth deserve safety. And if the people who are physically in control of them do not have their best interests or safety in mind, it is up to other adults in that youth’s life to help that youth access better safety. That’s what the California law is doing.”

In a statement, State Sen. Scott Wiener called the decision “dangerous.”

“The issue of forced outing has life or death consequences for far too many LGBTQ kids,” he said via email. “Some will die. Some will get kicked out and become homeless. Some will be sent to conversion therapy.”

Some parents challenging the law have suggested the opposite.

Two parents who signed onto the suit allege that they were not informed that their middle-school-aged child had started to use male pronouns and changed his name at school until he attempted suicide and was hospitalized. Another set of parents said that they confronted school leaders about using their child’s preferred pronouns and name, and were told that state law prevented the school from informing parents without their child’s permission.

“California’s policy of hiding a child’s gender transition from mom and dad was not only unconstitutional, but it was also dangerous. No school should ever place ideology above a child’s well-being or a parent’s God-given authority,” Greg Burt, the vice president of the California Family Council, said in a statement.

In their decision, the Supreme Court majority said parents are likely to succeed in the case, based on arguments that California’s law violates free exercise and due process rights.

Parents with religious objections have argued that they have “sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender” and “feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs,” according to the court. Other parents say it violates their 14th Amendment right to “have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’”

“California’s nondisclosure policy thus quite obviously excludes parents from highly important decisions about their child’s mental health … and is unlikely to satisfy heightened scrutiny. Our resolution of the parents’ likelihood of success on this claim is dictated by existing law,” the decision reads.

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, along with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan cautioned that the court’s decision, before hearing any oral arguments in the case or a full decision by the appellate court, is hasty.

“The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly,” she wrote.

She also criticized the court’s decision to use “shortcut procedures” to vacate the appeals court decision more quickly — pointing to a similar case out of Massachusetts that the Supreme Court is considering hearing.

Instead of adding that case to its docket to decide on the merits, the court elected to intervene on the California matter under an emergency basis.

“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in this case is deeply disturbing,” Equality California’s Executive Director Tony Hoang said in a statement after the ruling. “By stepping in on an emergency basis, the Court has effectively upended California’s student privacy protections without hearing full arguments and before the judicial process has run its course.

“While not surprising, this move reflects a dangerous willingness to short-circuit the established judicial process to dismantle protections for transgender youth,” Hoang continued.

While many have expressed outrage with the way the court went about its ruling, Greenesmith said that the Transgender Law Center, which is involved with multiple cases arguing to expand protections for trans people in state courts across the country, isn’t exactly hoping that the high court takes up more cases regarding transgender rights.

“I couldn’t say with full certainty that we are looking for any of these cases to go to the Supreme Court under circumstances in which they have shown a reluctance to understand basic constitutional principles like substantive due process, for example, from which our understanding of protections and sexual orientation and gender identity bases have sprung,” they said.

The Supreme Court’s other rulings affecting transgender youth are expected this spring.

“I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I am not expecting the court to support the rights of trans students to be able to access sports and teams and fun with their friends in the spring,” Greenesmith told KQED.

In the meantime, the court’s decision blocking California’s law will be applicable until the appellate court reaches a final decision. The timeline of that case is not yet known.

“It’s heartbreaking for us to hear stories from transgender youth and their families who really just want to have a day where they’re able to breathe and they’re to enjoy their lives and their privacy,” said Reyes Salinas, with Equality California. “And it’s unfortunate that their own government is doing everything in their power to not let that happen for them.”