March 2, 2026 — The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily allowed California schools to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender without the student’s consent, granting an emergency appeal from a conservative legal group.
The order pauses a state law and related school policies that barred automatic parental-notification requirements when students change pronouns or gender expression at school. Those rules were adopted to stop schools from outing students to their families without consent, particularly when disclosure could put a child at risk at home.
Two sets of Catholic parents, represented by the Thomas More Society, challenged the policies in court, arguing that schools misled them and secretly assisted their children’s social transitions over their objections. California officials defended the rules as a way to protect student privacy while trying to balance parental rights.
The high court sided with the parents and reinstated a lower-court injunction that blocks the state law and the policies while litigation continues.
The decision comes amid a series of recent Supreme Court rulings that have favored religious plaintiffs, including orders allowing parents to remove children from public-school lessons they find objectionable when those lessons include LGBTQ+ characters. Earlier this term the court upheld state restrictions on gender-identity–related health care for minors and has indicated it may permit states to bar transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams. In a separate Wisconsin case last December, the justices declined to hear a challenge, though three conservative justices said they would have taken the case and Justice Samuel Alito called the issue “of great and growing national importance.”
The Trump administration has also weighed in on California’s policies: in January it concluded the rules violated parents’ rights to education records and filed a separate suit challenging the state’s transgender athlete rules as a potential civil-rights violation.