A three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just blocked California's Assembly Bill 1955 — the law that forced teachers and school administrators to keep parents in the dark when their children expressed gender confusion. Two of the three judges were Trump nominees. The third was a Biden pick.
The ruling came barely three months after the Supreme Court sent a 6-3 signal in the Mirabelli case that parental notification policies are constitutionally protected.
AB 1955 was Sacramento's attempt to build a wall of silence between parents and their own kids. Under the law, school staff were effectively prohibited from telling a mother or father that their child had begun identifying as a different gender at school. The state didn't frame it that way, of course — California Attorney General Rob Bonta defended the statute as protecting students' privacy. But a federal judge named Roger Benitez had been poking holes in that argument since litigation began in 2023.
The 9th Circuit had actually overturned one of Judge Benitez's rulings back in January, which is what sent the fight to the Supreme Court in March. The justices issued an emergency order in the Mirabelli case that landed like a sledgehammer on every school district in America: you don't get to cut parents out of their children's lives.
Paul Jonna, Special Counsel for the Thomas More Society, put it plainly: "The Supreme Court has spoken to every state legislature and school district in America: you do not have the right to keep parents in the dark about their own children." Jonna added that the precedent is now universal — "It doesn't matter what state you're in or how your policy is worded. Mirabelli is the law of the land."
Nick Barry, Senior Counsel for America First Legal, which represents the plaintiffs, drove it home: "California cannot use state law to force schoolteachers and administrators into a conspiracy of silence against parents."
That phrase — "conspiracy of silence" — is worth sitting with. Because that's exactly what AB 1955 created. A system where the adults in a child's school knew something about that child that the adults in the child's home didn't. By design.
The 3rd Circuit reinforced the same principle in April, ruling in the Pine-Richland School District case that parental notification policies pass constitutional muster. So now you've got two federal appellate circuits — the 9th and the 3rd — arriving at the same destination the Supreme Court already mapped out. The courts ordered $4.5 million in attorney's fees to the Mirabelli plaintiffs, which tells you how seriously they took the state's position.
Bonta's office will presumably appeal. That's what attorneys general do when they lose cases they staked their political identity on. But the legal terrain has shifted underneath him. Three months ago, school districts could point to circuit-level ambiguity and claim they were just following state law. That ambiguity is gone.
Every parent whose school district quietly adopted a "don't tell mom and dad" policy now has case law — from the Supreme Court on down — that says the school works for the family, not the other way around. Every state legislature drafting its own version of AB 1955 just watched California's law get blocked by the very circuit court that covers the most liberal jurisdiction in the country.
The 9th Circuit used to be where conservative legal arguments went to die. Now it's where California's parental secrecy law just got a toe tag.
