A federal court ordered California on Monday to pay $4.52 million in attorneys’ fees after the Supreme Court blocked the state’s policy in March allowing schools to hide students’ “gender” transitions from parents.
Judge Roger Benitez in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of California ordered the state to pay millions to attorneys at Thomas More Society, the conservative public-interest law firm that represented plaintiffs in the case.
“A $4.5 million fee award sends an unmistakable message to state governments and school districts across the country: if you trample the constitutional rights of parents, you will pay for it—literally,” said Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at Thomas More Society.
The class action lawsuit was originally brought by two Christian teachers in California in 2023 and was joined in 2024 by several concerned parents whose families have been impacted by the policy. Among the plaintiffs are “John” and “Jane Poe,” devout Catholic parents who allege they were never informed that their junior-high daughter was treated as male at school for almost a year.
Thomas More Society attorneys representing the parents filed the emergency application to the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed a lower court decision blocking California’s policy. On December 22, 2025, Benitez issued a class-wide permanent injunction blocking the gender secrecy policies. On January 5, 2026, the federal appeals court stayed the injunction, allowing the policies to resume in public schools as litigation continued.
The conservative-leaning Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of concerned parents and reinstated the December district court ruling permanently halting the state’s school transgender policy.
The majority wrote in their opinion that religious parents, as well as parents who object purely because they believe they have the right to direct the upbringing of their children, are likely to succeed on the merits of their case and face irreparable harm if the policy is not halted during the lengthy litigation process. The court also cited its June 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which it sided with religious parents who sued their Maryland school board over its refusal to allow K-5 children to opt out of LGBTQ+ curriculum.
The majority wrote:
We conclude that the parents who seek religious exemptions are likely to succeed on the merits of their Free Exercise Clause claim. California’s policies likely trigger strict scrutiny under that provision because they substantially interfere with the right of parents to guide the religious development of their children,” the majority wrote. “The parents who assert a free exercise claim have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs. California’s policies violate those beliefs and impose the kind of burden on religious exercise that Yoder found unacceptable. Indeed, 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 in Mahmoud.
California’s policies will likely not survive the strict scrutiny that Mahmoud demands. The State argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy. But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.
California’s policies also appear to fail the narrow-tailoring requirement. The State’s interest in safety could be served by a policy that allows religious exemptions while precluding gender-identity disclosure to parents who would engage in abuse. For these reasons, the parents who object to the California policies on free exercise grounds are likely to succeed on the merits.
“The same is true for the subclass of parents who object to those policies on due process grounds. Under long-established precedent, parents — not the State — have primary authority with respect to the upbringing and education of children,” they added. “The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”
Benitez said in his Monday order that California has engaged in “litigation intransigence,” including repeatedly filing motions to dismiss the case, filing appeals before rulings, and withdrawing arguments several times. He said attorneys and plaintiffs had to spend an inordinate amount of time on the case “required to overcome the defendants’ litigation strategy of resisting at all junctures.”
Benitez multiplied the fee award significantly as a result of California’s relentless legal actions, which Thomas More Society called a “rare enhancement.”
“California threw everything it had at this case,” Breen said. “It lost at summary judgment, lost at the Supreme Court and now Californians will foot the bill for their government officials’ refusal to respect the fundamental rights of families.”
Judge Benitez noted that California is still fighting the case, including filing a recent motion to change the injunction blocking the policy that the Supreme Court reinstated in its March ruling.
Breitbart News reached out to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office for comment but did not hear back by time of publication.
The case is Mirabelli v. Bonta, No. 23-CV-768 in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of California.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
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