A federal court on Monday ordered California to pay $4.52 million in attorneys’ fees following a Supreme Court decision in March that blocked the state’s policy allowing schools to withhold information about students’ gender transitions from parents.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California, a George W. Bush appointee, directed the state to pay the fees to attorneys from the Thomas More Society, which represented the 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 filed in 2023 by two Christian teachers in California and later expanded in 2024 to include several parents who said their families were affected by the policy.
Among the plaintiffs are individuals identified in court filings as “John” and “Jane Poe,” who said they were not informed that their junior high school daughter had been treated as male at school for nearly a year.
Attorneys with the Thomas More Society filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit paused a lower court ruling that had blocked the policy.
On Dec. 22, 2025, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez issued a class-wide permanent injunction against the policy. The appeals court later stayed that injunction on Jan. 5, 2026, allowing the policy to remain in effect while litigation continued, Breitbart News reported.
The Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision, ruled in favor of parents challenging the policy and reinstated the district court’s December ruling, effectively halting California’s school policy during ongoing litigation.
In its majority opinion, the court said the parents were likely to succeed on the merits of their claims and could face irreparable harm if the policy remained in place. The justices noted that the case involved both religious objections and broader parental rights to direct the upbringing of their children.
The court also referenced its June 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which it ruled in favor of parents who challenged a Maryland school board’s refusal to allow young students to opt out of certain curriculum materials.
The majority wrote for the high court:
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 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.
Benitez multiplied the fee award by a significant amount because of California’s relentless legal actions, which Thomas More Society called a “rare enhancement.”
Breen said: “California threw everything it had at this case. 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.”
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
