A few short years ago, as the Biden administration pushed to redefine Title IX on the (spurious) premise that the word “sex” meant “gender identity.” There was significant reason to fear that gender ideology indoctrination would become a permanent feature of American public education. However, as 2026 begins, the grip of gender ideology in schools is more tenuous than ever; not only because of the Trump administration’s actions, but also because the courts have caught up to the constitutional violations inherent in such indoctrination.
Gender ideology indoctrination in schools is a three-legged stool: (1) teachers directly instruct students in the tenets of gender ideology; (2) schools force students to use “preferred pronouns” when their peers identify as the other sex; (3) schools prohibit staff from telling parents when they socially gender transition their children.
Three major court decisions this year have taken an axe, respectively, to each of those three legs.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that if schools could not teach lessons endorsing gender ideology, without they must allow offering parents the option of opting their children out of lessons teaching that content. Religious parents in Montgomery County, Maryland — represented by the Becket Fund — claimed their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion was being violated when the school mandated that the curriculum contain books and lessons promoting gender ideology without providing parents the option to remove their children from these lessons that contradicted their faith. Although the families had different faith backgrounds, their sacred scriptures all teach that God created two sexes: male and female. By undermining that basic teaching, the public schools were undermining the faith formation of religious students. “It is both insulting and unserious,” Justice Alito wrote, “to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their child in their religious faith.”
Last month, the full panel of the Sixth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled in favor of Parents Defending Education, a parental rights group, over the Olentangy School District of Ohio. The Court required the school district to drop its policy of punishing students who use biologically correct, rather than transgender “preferred,” pronouns was unconstitutional. Schools may still, of course, discipline students who tease or taunt their peers based on appearance or dress; but not for merely referring to a boy as “him.” In his concurrence, Judge John Bush wrote: “This case is about a government attempt to alter traditional grammar. If the issue seems odd, that’s because it is.” But perhaps not so odd, because as Judges Amul Thapar and John Nalbandian concurred, “The battle of the pronouns is a matter of serious political and social concern,” on which the school has clearly taken one partisan side.
This constitutes impermissible viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment. Not to mention that, as Judge Bush put it, the “government simply cannot regulate grammar — full stop.”
And right before Christmas, California parents got a gift from a federal judge: a class action injunction against state and school district mandates that kept social gender transitioning secret from parents. The facts of one of the cases are harrowing: A girl asked the school to socially transition her at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year. The school not only did not tell the parents about their daughter’s request but actively deceived them at a back-to-school night; her teachers used her legal name and true sex when talking to her parents. When the parents discovered the school employee’s deception, they confronted the principal — who outright lied to them about it.
“As it turned out,” the court wrote, the girl’s “change in gender expression was a tremendously significant sign. The (…) parents did not learn of their child’s deteriorated mental health until after she attempted suicide. Adding insult to constitutional injury, California public schools still refuse to use the child’s given female name in spite of the … parents’ instructions.”
A doctor who reviewed the girl’s medical history stated that if the parents had been informed, there could have been coordinated mental health care “so there would be no September hospitalization, there would be no multiple psychotropic drugs, there would not be a girl who is hallucinating. We could have prevented all of this. We wouldn’t be sitting here today.”
The school’s conduct violated the parents’ 14th Amendment “fundamental right of [these] parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children” that is protected by the 14th Amendment. The court held that parents have a “federal constitutional right to be informed if their public-school child expresses gender incongruence,” a federal right that is “superior to any state or local law … regulation … or policy to the contrary.”
Of course, just because the courts have declared these practices unconstitutional doesn’t mean schools will drop them. In his concurrence in Mahmoud, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “the courts should carefully police” such “ingenious defiance of the Constitution [in schools] no less than in other contexts.”
But for the courts to safeguard constitutional protections in schools, parents must bring legal complaints to them. With plenty of federal court precedent now at their disposal, and local trial attorneys eager to do well by doing good, such a prospect is now realistic.
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The notion of “parental rights” in schools is no longer oppositional rhetoric but established constitutional reality. If a fraction of the parents who showed up to school board meetings to stand up for their rights in 2021 start filing legal complaints in 2026, we could see a serious and lasting rollback in gender indoctrination in schools across the country.
Max Eden serves as the Federal Education Policy director at the America First Policy Institute.
