For years, a legal battle has been brewing across the nation, but particularly in California, regarding parents’ right to notice and consent when students seek to identify as the opposite sex at school. An August 2025 study by the Williams Institute found that 3.3 percent of youth between 13 and 17 identify as transgender — a marked increase relative to prior years.
As rates of transgender identification increased, some teachers and administrators took it upon themselves to aid children in their transition while keeping the children’s parents in the dark.
Across California, school districts have taken different tacks. The vast majority, however, treat parents as hostile figures who should learn as little as possible about what goes on with their children at school. Others protecting parents’ rights to stay abreast of important developments in their children’s lives.
On Jan. 28 of this year, the U.S. Department of Education confirmed what parents’ rights advocates have been saying for years — that keeping parents in the dark violates their right to access their children’s educational records.
Although school districts have varied in their approaches, California has consistently taken an anti-parent stance as it relates to trans-identifying minors. As lawsuits related to parents’ rights unfolded, California played a major role in each case, inevitably on the side of secrecy.
In July 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act into law, which codified secrecy as a statewide policy. Thanks to this law, it generally became illegal for schools to require employees to notify parents when their children undergo a gender transition at school.
While there have been numerous legal battles related to parents’ rights in California, three are particularly worth highlighting.
In the Northern California community of Chico, a mother, Aurora Regino, filed suit after her 11-year-old daughter’s school facilitated her social transition to a boy and failed to notify Regino in accordance with district policy. The Ninth Circuit overturned a judge’s initial dismissal of the case, which is now on appeal following a second dismissal.
In the Southern California community of Chino Valley, the school board adopted a pro-parent policy, requiring schools to notify parents when students (including those as young as five years old) ask to be treated as the opposite sex. The state of California wasted no time in suing the Chino Valley school district. Six parents intervened in the case to help the district defend the policy. Ultimately, the judge approved a narrowed version of the policy, which allowed the school to notify parents regarding any change in the student’s record.
In another case, a trial court in the Southern District of California has entered a statewide injunction against school policies that require schools to keep information about their children’s gender identity secret. Like the Regino case, that decision is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which halted the injunction while the case is pending.
In all three cases, parents’ constitutional rights were at the forefront of the litigation. A long line of Supreme Court cases has recognized parents’ fundamental rights in a variety of settings, including to direct their children’s upbringing, to control their education, and to make medical decisions on their behalf. Facilitating a minor’s gender transition at school lies at the intersection of each of these fundamental rights.
A child’s decision to live as the opposite gender is a consequential event — one which, according to California’s expert witness in the Chino Valley case, is a medically recognized treatment for gender dysphoria. Yet California contended that a minor’s nebulous right to privacy superseded any right on the part of parents’ to be involved in such a decision.
While the Department of Education focused on California’s violations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the department’s findings nonetheless highlighted California’s disregard for parents and their rights. Indeed, the department concluded, “California state laws, guidance, and legal actions … have effectively coerced districts to withhold information from parents in violation” of the law.
The department’s report therefore identified the crucial issue animating disputes between parents and the state regarding gender transition at school: the rights of parents. While schools play an important role in educating children, that role is limited — raising children is the job of parents, and not the state. By shining a light on California’s disregard for parents and their rights, the Department of Education took an important step in restoring the importance of parents and their rights to their proper place in American law and education.
Jesse Franklin-Murdock was co-counsel for the parent-intervenors in the Chino Valley case and is one of the attorneys representing Aurora Regino. He is the Miles Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Liberty and counsel at Dhillon Law Group Inc., where his practice includes political law and civil rights.