His court order<\/a> also bars school districts from \u201cmisleading\u201d parents related to \u201ctheir child\u2019s gender presentation at school.\u201d School employees are prohibited from \u201cdirectly 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCalifornia public schools may be gun-free zones, but they are not First Amendment-free zones,\u201d Benitez wrote in a 52-page ruling<\/a> that accompanied the court order. \u201cReligious teachers face an unlawful choice between sacrificing their faith and sacrificing their teaching position.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cBecause the State Defendants\u2019 parental exclusion policies … demand that teachers communicate misrepresentations or deceptively avoidant responses to parental questions, which, in turn, violate the constitutional rights of parents, this type of government speech may not be forced upon teachers who conscientiously disagree.\u201d<\/p>\n Critics characterized the outcome as a setback for student privacy and LGBTQ+ protections. <\/p>\n The Dec. 22 ruling undermines California\u2019s long-standing efforts \u201cto help ensure all students feel safe and respected at school, even if they are not ready or able to be out at home or are navigating a less-than-supportive family dynamic,\u201d said Christine Parker, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.<\/p>\n The state appealed the decision the same day it was issued. The appeals court issued a short-term stay while it considers whether to allow the order to take effect during the appeal process.<\/p>\n What prompted the suit?<\/p>\n The case was filed in April 2023 on behalf of San Diego County public schoolteachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West. Mirabelli taught seventh-grade English and West, physical education, at Rincon Middle School in the Escondido Union School District. Each had more than two decades of experience and was a past local \u201cteacher of the year,\u201d according to their complaint. <\/p>\n Both also are devout Roman Catholics who objected to their school district\u2019s policy \u2014 based on state guidelines \u2014 that barred disclosures related to a student\u2019s gender identity.<\/p>\n The case was championed<\/a> by the Thomas More Society<\/a>, a public interest law firm, and allied attorneys. It immediately became a test case on the sometimes conflicting delineation of free speech, religious freedom, student privacy, parental rights and state versus federal law. <\/p>\n The case also is among those at the center of a national debate between advocates for LGBTQ+ rights versus religious conservatives whose positions commonly include a rejection of transgender identity and opposition to same-sex marriage. <\/p>\n Ahmad Suntani holds a sign calling for parents rights in a demonstration outside an Orange Unified School District board meeting in 2023. The board passed a policy that required parental notification if a child changed gender identification or pronouns at school. State lawmakers later banned such policies.<\/p>\n (Ringo Chiu \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n The case was ultimately expanded to include other teachers and parents and granted class-action status \u2014 which ensured that its outcome would apply statewide.<\/p>\n School districts \u201cwill need to revisit their policies on providing transparency to parents and what the process should look like,\u201d said Lance Christensen, vice president of California Policy Center, which applauded the ruling. \u201cIf I\u2019m a school board trustee, I would immediately track down our secrecy policies … and fix them immediately to concur with [this] ruling.\u201d <\/p>\n In court papers appealing the ruling<\/a>, the office of state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta contends that the ruling suspends enforcement of \u201clongstanding state laws that protect vulnerable transgender and gender nonconforming students\u201d and that it \u201cwill create chaos and confusion among students, parents, teachers, and staff at California\u2019s public schools.\u201d<\/p>\n Benitez declined to declare that conflicting state law is unconstitutional. <\/p>\n The state law<\/a> \u2014 which remains in force \u2014 bars school districts from requiring parent notification. The law, brought forward in 2024 as Assembly Bill 1955, was in response to actions by a handful of California school districts<\/a> that passed policies mandating that school employees notify parents of changes related to a student\u2019s gender identity.<\/p>\n The result is that state law protects the rights of school employees to keep students\u2019 gender identity confidential. Meanwhile, according to Benitez\u2019s ruling, federal law protects the rights of school employees to do exactly the opposite.<\/p>\n How school districts should navigate the matter in their policies remains murky, according to some experts. Supporters of the ruling say the path is clear: Schools should simply tell parents about gender-identity issues.<\/p>\n It remains a legally thorny question about \u201cwhether prohibiting schools, including teachers and staff, from informing parents violates the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children,\u201d said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. <\/p>\n Chemerinsky criticized the ruling and said it should be vulnerable to an appeal. All the same, \u201cthe question is how to balance the parents\u2019 rights against the speech interests and autonomy of the children.\u201d<\/p>\n Judge favors parents\u2019 rights<\/p>\n In court documents, Mirabelli and West said they sought a religious accommodation to exempt them from following district policy. <\/p>\n When their school district substantially denied their request, they filed suit. <\/p>\n At issue were state guidelines, which were available online at the time, that stated in part that \u201cthe right of transgender students to keep their transgender status private is grounded in California\u2019s anti-discrimination laws as well as federal and state laws.\u201d Disclosing that a student is transgender \u201cwithout the student\u2019s permission may violate California\u2019s anti-discrimination law by increasing the student\u2019s vulnerability to harassment and may violate the student\u2019s right to privacy,\u201d the guidelines stated.<\/p>\n \u201cWith rare exceptions, schools are required to respect the limitations that a student places on the disclosure of their transgender status, including not sharing that information with the student\u2019s parents,\u201d the guidance said.<\/p>\n A teacher, in an anonymous declaration cited in Benitez\u2019s ruling, said: \u201cI believe that God made man and woman in his image, both male and female. I believe that it is impossible to change our sex and that our sex was given to us by God for a reason. I also believe that Scripture teaches that parents have a moral responsibility to guide their children and that children have a moral responsibility to obey their parents. This is a sacred relationship that it is immoral for me to interfere with.\u201d<\/p>\n It soon became apparent that Benitez was sympathetic to the teachers\u2019 claims. In an attempt to avoid an adverse outcome, the state argued in court documents that its guidance was voluntary. Then, the California Department of Education took down the guidance from its website. But the ruling states that similar wording continued to appear in state-sanctioned teacher-training materials, which Benitez cited as a factor in the forcefulness of his decision.<\/p>\n Moving forward, he ruled that such materials would have to include the following statement:<\/p>\n \u201cParents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition, under the ruling, school staff cannot use a name or pronoun for a child other than what is in official records if a parent objects to it.<\/p>\n Also, no school worker can be required to use a name or pronoun that does not match the child\u2019s legal name and \u201cnatal pronouns.\u201d This provision safeguards an employee\u2019s right to free speech and to exercise their religious belief, Benitez ruled.<\/p>\n Benitez ordered state officials to prove they had complied with the ruling within 20 days. <\/p>\n In his analysis, Benitez relied substantially on the 2024 Supreme Court case of Mahmoud vs. Taylor, which gave parents the right to opt their children out of lessons with pro-LGBTQ+ themes.<\/p>\n Whether these cases can be connected in this way will be one subject of the appeal.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s highly likely this issue will eventually make it to the U.S. Supreme Court,\u201d said Kimberly West-Faulcon, who is critical of the ruling and teaches constitutional law at LMU Loyola Law School. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal court ruling has affirmed the free speech and religious rights of California teachers who want to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[63931,7,9,8,1436,3409,4294,1554,7087,15157,20897,4265,37318,225,1848,63930,10384],"class_list":["post-121799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-benitez","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-case","tag-child","tag-gender-identity","tag-name","tag-parent","tag-right","tag-ruling","tag-school","tag-school-district","tag-state","tag-state-law","tag-student-privacy","tag-teacher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1767677062_146_.jpeg\")
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