Read more at LGBTQ Nation.
The Supreme Court yesterday blocked a law in California that bans teachers from outing trans kids to their parents from going into effect. The decision was 6-3, with the six Republican appointees opposing trans rights and the three Democratic appointees taking the side of trans kids.
The case involves teachers from Escondido Union School District who claim that their Christian faith requires them to out trans kids to their parents. They argue that their “right to exercise [their] own religious beliefs” is being violated by the district policy, which was established in response to 2016 legal guidance from the California Department of Education advising districts not to out students.
Trans and nonbinary youth can be put at risk of parental rejection and homelessness if outed to their parents.
The teachers, who were later joined by several parents in their lawsuit, won their case in a lower court in December, where Bush-appointed Judge Roger Benitez said that California should “trust parents to do the right thing for their child” and let teachers out trans kids to their parents, even in cases where the child fears abuse, neglect, or homelessness as a result. Trans and nonbinary youth are much more likely to experience homelessness compared to cisgender youth.
In early January, a panel of judges on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued a stay to Benitez’s injunction, allowing California to enforce its trans youth protections as appeals work their way through the legal system.
But the teachers appealed to the Supreme Court, which sided with them and granted their emergency request for a stay.
The Court issued an 18-page unsigned ruling that said they believe that the parents are “likely to succeed on the merits” of their religious freedom claim, which was that there is a “right of parents to guide the religious development of their children” that also implies a right to know how their children are presenting their gender at school. The Court said that not outing kids to their parents is an even “greater… intrusion on the parents’ free exercise rights” than schools letting kids read books with LGBTQ+ characters, which the Court also ruled schools couldn’t do in its Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling last year.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that this case shows how the “emergency docket can malfunction” because the case involved “novel legal questions” that the Court is ruling on with “inadequate briefing.”
“The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly,” she wrote, noting that the federal appeals court hasn’t even ruled on the appeals in the case yet.
On the more substantive issues, Kagan wrote that the Constitution makes no mention of parental rights and that the conservatives on the Court relied on the Due Process Clause, which they usually read narrowly. She pointed out that the idea that women have a right to control their own bodies elicits “outright hostility” from her conservative colleagues when it’s suggested to be part of the Constitution’s due process protections. But now the same conservatives found that that clause gives parents the right to know how their children are presenting their genders at school.
She added that parents’ rights have to be balanced against the “critical interests in the care and education of children” that the state has, and that they needed to follow “ordinary processes” to address that balance.
Outing trans youth to their parents puts them at increased risk of homelessness, according to the Williams Institute. Not only that, they might still be exploring their identities and need to exercise control over their coming-out process.
“Transition isn’t a flick of a switch; it’s a complex, gradual, weaving journey of identity,” Connie Walden, a trans woman, wrote to the New York Times in 2023.
“My own transition started in high school. At what stage between my experimenting with makeup now and then to asking specific friends to call me Connie would I have officially, suddenly, socially transitioned? When should I have been robbed of the right to come out to my own family, to decide when to include them in my own process?”
“I recognize the pain of well-meaning parents who feel that their child kept such a large ‘secret’ from them. Yet with transition being a gradual process of experimentation, there is no big secret. There’s only kids slowly figuring out who they are, like all other kids.”
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