Behind the Scenes: The Supreme Court Protects Parental Rights

On March 2, 2026, the United States Supreme Court issued a watershed ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta, a case that set the binding, nationwide precedent that schools cannot secretly socially transition a gender-confused minor. The majority per curiam opinion is less than 1,800 words. Since September 2022, I have spent just over 1,800 hours working on the case alongside lead counsel Paul Jonna. That’s one hour for every word. It was 100 percent worth it.

The case has more than enough facts to make your stomach sick. In January 2016, after pressure from activist groups, the California Department of Education published new guidance on the legal rights of “transgender youth in schools” in the form of two webpages: a Legal Advisory page and an FAQ page. Therein, the CDE explained that because of the Privacy Clause of the California Constitution, “[w]ith 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’s parents.” The CDE’s policies then spread across the state and the country. 

Fast forward several years. Two teachers at Rincon Middle School in San Diego County, California—Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West—found themselves with a crisis of conscience. In February 2022, they—alongside all of their fellow teachers—watched a video slideshow presentation where their school district’s Director of Integrated Student Services explained the new rules. 

Mrs. Mirabelli, a seventh grade English teacher, immediately emailed the Director asking whether parents and guardians would “have the content of this presentation shared with them in some format (how and when)?” The email she received in response—two months later, in April 2022—from a replacement Director, stated tersely: “At this time, parents/guardians will not receive it.” But it was the next email that truly makes one shudder.

In August 2022, with the beginning of the school year, Mrs. Mirabelli and the other teachers on her team received an email listing seven students with new preferred names and pronouns. Six of the seven had parents who were “NOT aware.” One student’s pronouns were “he/it.” Another wanted her teachers to use one name and set of pronouns with her mother—who was facilitating the transition—and a different name with her father, who knew nothing. All seven were biological girls. The email ended each entry with the same instruction: “please use [name] and she/her when calling home.” Only the last student on the list had a parent who was, in the email’s cheerful phrasing, “aware and supportive :).” This was too much.

So, Elizabeth Mirabelli and eighth-grade teacher Lori Ann West reached out to Thomas More Society for help, who then turned to LiMandri & Jonna LLP as their Special Counsel in California. When their case came across my desk, my initial reaction at reading that email was horror. 

Mrs. Mirabelli’s objection was not that of a meddler. It was that of a Catholic woman who understood, at an intuitive and theological level, that using one name for a child at school and another name when speaking with her parents was not discretion—it was active deception. 

In the age of the Internet and cell phones, she had far more regular contact with parents than I remembered from when I was in school. She communicated regularly over email. In that context, maintaining a double identity for a child made her nauseous with anxiety. She was being asked to come between parents and their children, and she knew exactly why that was wrong.

She showed me the Vatican’s document, “Male and Female He Created Them”: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education. Published by the Congregation for Catholic Education, Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi explained that the primary responsibility for dealing with the complexities of gender confusion must rest with parents:

Across this educational alliance, pedagogical activity should be informed by the principle of subsidiarity: “All other participants in the process of education are only able to carry out their responsibilities in the name of the parents, with their consent and, to a certain degree, with their authorization.” If they succeed in working together, family, school and the broader society can produce educational programmes on affectivity and sexuality that respect each person’s own stage of maturity regarding these areas and at the same time promote respect for the body of the other person. They would also take into account the physiological and psychological specificity of young people, as well as the phase of neurocognitive growth and maturity of each one, and thus be able to accompany them in their development in a healthy and responsible way.

The principle of subsidiarity—that authority over a child’s formation belongs first to the family and that the state may only act in the name of the parents, with their consent—was not just a religious conviction. It was also the law. One hundred years ago, in striking down a statute requiring all children to attend public schools, the federal district court in Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus & Mary wrote that 

parents possess a natural and inherent right to the nurture, control, and tutorship of their offspring, that they may be brought up according to the parents’ conception of what is right and just, decent, and respectable, and manly and noble in life. 

The next year, 1925, the Supreme Court affirmed the district court and published its seminal case on parental rights. What the Church teaches and what the Constitution protects were, on this point, the same thing. And California was violating both. But what could possibly be done?

When we filed our lawsuit in April 2023, there were a few other cases pending across the country, but they nearly all involved parents suing over a violation of their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. This made the most sense. Parents were the most logical plaintiffs because the right primarily being violated belongs to parents. All we could argue is that Mrs. Mirabelli and Mrs. West don’t want to participate in the violation of parents’ rights, a bit of a backward procedural posture.

The fact that teachers were protesting, however, proved to be very important. Federal courts across the country found procedural ways of dismissing parental challenges—holding that parents lacked standing, that cases were moot when districts withdrew policies, or that districts were immune from liability. The only people with bulletproof standing were teachers who could put forth evidence that unless they agreed to violate parents’ rights, they would be fired.

The only people who could put a stop to this madness were teachers who would be fired if they did not agree to violate parents’ rights—teachers who could have just as easily kept their heads down and chosen not to make a ruckus. For them, there was no upside to objecting—only downsides. 

And Mrs. Mirabelli and Mrs. West did suffer significant retaliation and were eventually driven from their school. But they still stood up. They still said they would not participate. And after we obtained a preliminary injunction in their favor, they had courage to lead when we added more teachers—and parents—and converted their case into a statewide class action.

Eventually, on December 22, 2025, our federal district court issued a class-wide permanent injunction prohibiting California from deceiving parents about their child’s gender confusion. The court found that California’s parental exclusion policies created a “trifecta of harm”: they harm the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention; they harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized 14th Amendment right to care, guide, and make health-care decisions for their children—and by substantially burdening their First Amendment right to train their children in their sincerely held religious beliefs; and they harm teachers who are compelled to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students.

The Ninth Circuit immediately stayed enforcement of the injunction on December 26. Then, we used the Supreme Court’s emergency procedures—the same ones we successfully used to open the churches in 2020—to convince the Supreme Court to largely vacate that stay. In a piece of divine humor, while the Supreme Court’s ruling contained a robust, substantive affirmance of the rights of parents, citing Society of Sisters, it did not discuss at all the rights of teachers. Yet perhaps that is how it should be. With the rights of parents now firmly established, Mrs. Mirabelli and Mrs. West cannot be ordered to violate the law.

And they were never truly objecting to California’s secrecy regime in order to protect themselves but to protect the children in their charge. The principle of subsidiarity—that parents are the first educators, and that all others act only in their name—is not merely a legal doctrine or a religious teaching. It is the natural order, recognized by the Church, affirmed by the Constitution, and now vindicated by the Supreme Court of the United States. In that respect, Mrs. Mirabelli and Mrs. West have fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept their faith.