In a devastating blow to transgender student privacy rights, the Supreme Court has blocked California’s law that prevented schools from automatically outing trans students to their parents. The 6-3 decision, handed down this week, allows schools to notify parents if a student changes their pronouns or gender expression at school, even without the student’s permission.

California had passed its 2024 law specifically to protect trans students from potential harm. The state argued that forced disclosure of a student’s gender identity or pronouns puts young people at “reasonable risk of physical, emotional, and psychological harm”. The law was designed to give trans students agency over who knows about their identity, recognizing that not all home environments are safe for LGBTQ+ youth.

But the court’s conservative majority sided with the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group that argued parents have a constitutional right to know about their kids’ gender identity. The ruling leaned on free exercise and First Amendment protections, claiming parents with “sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender” have the right to raise their children according to those beliefs. The court also referenced parental rights under the 14th Amendment, stating parents can’t be “shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health”.

The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, strongly dissented. Justice Kagan pointed out the hypocrisy in the court’s reasoning, noting that the ruling contradicts previous 14th Amendment interpretations. She specifically highlighted how the court overturned Roe v. Wade based on the idea that the Constitution protects rights not explicitly written in the text. “This decision cannot but induce a strong sense of whiplash,” Kagan wrote, calling out the inconsistency in how the majority applies constitutional principles.

This ruling comes after the Trump administration launched an investigation into California’s law in January, claiming the state violated parents’ right to access records about students’ gender identity. The Supreme Court’s decision essentially validates that argument and represents what the Thomas More Society is calling “the most significant parental rights ruling in a generation”.

For trans students in California and potentially beyond, this decision is huge, and not in a good way. It strips away a critical protection that allowed young people to explore their identity in a safer school environment. For many trans youth, schools offer a space where they can be themselves when home isn’t safe. Now that protection is gone, leaving vulnerable students exposed to potential harm from forced disclosure to unsupportive families.