California indoctrinates kids into LGBT & trans without parental approval

States, scholars, lawmakers, and activists have filed a dozen amicus briefs with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, urging it to maintain an injunction against the state of California’s efforts to exclude parents from school decisions to “socially transition” their gender-confused children.

Back in 2023, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez sided with Christian teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West in their lawsuit against Escondido Union School District, which was trying to force teachers to withhold from parents signs that a child is suffering from gender dysphoria. The policy created a “trifecta of harm” that “harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention,” the judge found at the time.

Later that month, however, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a guidance directing school districts to disregard that ruling, as it only applied to those specific teachers in that specific district, along with a similar ruling by a lower court in another case. In December 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California issued a statewide permanent injunction against the Bonta policy, again written by Benitez.

The Ninth Circuit went on to stay that injunction, however, in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court vacated in March, while the legal battle continues.

Now, Thomas More Society reports that a dozen briefs have been filed urging the Ninth Circuit to affirm Benitez’s ruling. Among the signatories are U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Kevin Cramer, Roger Marshall, and James Banks; the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia; a coalition of pro-family groups and ex-officeholders led by Advancing American Freedom; the American College of Pediatricians; conservative legal scholars Robert George, Melissa Moschella, and Eric DeGroff; and more.

“Twelve amicus briefs — from sitting senators and state attorneys general to pediatricians and constitutional scholars, joined by parents who lived through what this policy did to their own families — all converge on the same point,” explained Thomas More special counsel Paul Jonna. “And it is the point the Supreme Court already made in March, when it restored the injunction and held that California’s policies likely will not survive the strict scrutiny that is required. Parents, not school bureaucrats, have the right to raise their children and to direct their religious upbringing. That means a school may not facilitate a child’s gender transition without their knowledge and consent. The Supreme Court’s word on the Constitution is final for every court below, and we are confident the Ninth Circuit will treat it that way.”

“The Supreme Court already told California that its gender secrecy policy cannot stand. Now dozens of states, sitting members of Congress, physicians, and legal scholars are echoing the same message,” added Thomas More executive vice president Peter Breen. “California should stop fighting a battle it has already lost and let parents back into their children’s lives.”

A large body of evidence sides firmly with the Trump approach, finding that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through “gender transitions” had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”

The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other agenda items has long been a major concern in American schools and libraries, from bookshelves to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas. Across the nation, controversy has also erupted in recent years over schools and libraries adopting books that expose sexual themes and activity to children, often in graphic detail and with pornographic imagery depicting specific sexual acts.