The State of California is attempting to use the Ninth Circuit to neutralize a permanent injunction the Supreme Court just reinstated, filing an emergency motion that parent-plaintiffs say amounts to forum-shopping against the highest court in the land.
California Deputy Solicitor General Julie Veroff filed the March 6 motion asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to modify or clarify the injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez. That injunction bars California public schools from concealing students' gender identity transitions from their parents. The Supreme Court reinstated it earlier this month after the Ninth Circuit had stayed it.
The Thomas More Society, representing the parent-plaintiffs, fired back on Tuesday with an opposition brief arguing a simple and devastating point: the Ninth Circuit lacks jurisdiction to modify an order the Supreme Court itself restored.
Judge Benitez's injunction requires California public schools to inform parents when their children adopt a new gender identity at school. The state had implemented policies allowing schools to facilitate social gender transitions, including new names and pronouns, without parental knowledge or consent.
Benitez was explicit about the injunction's purpose and its limits. From his order:
This injunction is intended to promote child safety by guaranteeing fit parents a role in some of the most consequential decisions of their children's lives while permitting the State to shield children from unfit parents by enforcing child-abuse laws in cases of compelling need.
That last clause matters, Just the News reported. The injunction already carves out protections for children in genuinely abusive households. California's child abuse laws remain fully enforceable. The state can still intervene when a child faces real danger. What the state can no longer do is treat every parent as a presumptive threat simply because their child claims a new gender identity at school.
At a March 9 hearing, Benitez even offered to modify his order to further clarify that it does not block state action against unfit parents. The judge, in other words, has already addressed the supposed concern California is now racing to the Ninth Circuit to raise.
Which raises the obvious question: if the district judge offered clarification and the injunction already preserves child abuse enforcement, what exactly is California doing at the Ninth Circuit?
Paul Jonna, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, did not mince words in a press release:
That tells you everything about what their latest legal maneuver is really about … seeking an end-run around the Supreme Court.
The sequence of events tells the story clearly:
California lost at the district level. It won a temporary reprieve at the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court overruled that reprieve. And now California is back at the Ninth Circuit, asking the same court that was just overruled to effectively undo what the Supreme Court did.
The Ninth Circuit, it should be noted, has been the most overturned federal appellate court since 2007. That distinction has not, apparently, inspired any institutional humility.
California's legal maneuvering reveals something deeper than a procedural disagreement. The state's position rests on a foundational assumption that parents are the problem. That a child's school counselor or teacher is better positioned than a mother or father to navigate questions of identity that will shape the rest of that child's life.
This is not a fringe reading of California's stance. It is the explicit architecture of the policies Benitez struck down. Schools were empowered to create an entirely separate identity for a child during school hours, complete with new names and pronouns, while actively hiding that identity from the people legally and morally responsible for the child's welfare.
Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, offered a revealing comment in an interview with Chalkbeat about what the injunction might require of schools. He questioned whether it would compel teachers to call parents to report a child's gender identity change, characterizing such a requirement as "kind of absurd." He also suggested that "parents may very well know" already.
Both points collapse under scrutiny. If parents already know, then notification changes nothing and California has no reason to fight the injunction this hard. And if contacting parents about a major development in their child's life sounds absurd, then we have arrived at a place where the basic obligations of institutions entrusted with children have been completely inverted. Schools call parents when a child gets a C in algebra. The suggestion that they should also call when a child announces a new identity is not absurd. It is the bare minimum.
The Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Mahmoud reinforced what should never have required reinforcement: parents possess fundamental rights over the upbringing of their children. This is not a novel legal theory. It is bedrock constitutional law stretching back decades.
California's resistance to that principle is not about protecting vulnerable kids. The injunction already accounts for them. It is about preserving an ideological framework in which the state, not the family, serves as the primary authority over a child's formation. Every motion filed, every procedural maneuver attempted, every emergency request to a friendly appellate court serves that goal.
The parents who brought this case did so because their children's schools decided that mothers and fathers were obstacles to be circumvented. The Supreme Court disagreed. Judge Benitez disagreed. The law, as it now stands, disagrees.
California's response was not to comply. It was to find another door.
