President Donald Trump’s political movement, which vehemently opposes transgender rights, just won another big victory at the Supreme Court.
On Monday the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision reinstated a federal district court decision guaranteeing parents the right to be informed if their children identify as transgender or wish to socially transition. The majority argued religious parents would likely succeed in arguing the First Amendment guarantees them the free exercise of religion.
“California’s policies … substantially interfere with the right of parents to guide the religious development of their children,” the court decided in its unsigned majority opinion for Mirabelli v. Bonta. Referring to last year’s case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which a Maryland school district was not allowed to prohibit parents from opting their kids out of LGBTQ storybooks, the majority ruled “the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights here—unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition—is greater than the introduction of LGBTQ storybooks we considered sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny.” They added that gender dysphoria “is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California’s policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours.”
They added, “These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”
Because the Supreme Court repeatedly sides with Trump on issues involving his desire to expand his executive power, critics accuse the judges of being overtly pro-Trump. Yet SCOTUSblog editor Sarah Isgur recently argued to The Atlantic that the bench’s relationship with Trump is more complicated than that.
“By striking down President Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court has once again shown that it is no partisan instrument of Republican power,” Isgur argued. “Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the decision, has a much more ambitious goal in mind.” She added that “in his first term, Trump had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century. In fact, the first Trump administration was the first modern presidential administration more likely to lose than win before the Supreme Court, including in cases involving immigration and the census.”
Yet Vox legal correspondent Ian Millhiser does not think that even the Supreme Court’s anti-Trump decisions necessarily mean that they are being less partisan.
"Gorsuch is among the Court’s most outspoken judicial supremacists, and his opinions suggest that his Court should invalidate many federal policies even when those policies are authorized by an act of Congress," Millhiser speculated. "Barrett, by contrast, suggests that her Court should take a more humble approach when the two elected branches do not share the justices’ preferences — even as she also concludes that Trump’ s tariffs went too far."