207. Parents' Rights vs. School Secrecy: Laura Powell on Mirabelli v. Bonta at the Supreme Court
About this episode
Laura Powell discusses the Mirabelli v. Bonta case and its implications for parents' rights and school secrecy regarding children's gender identity.
Joining me today is Laura Powell, an attorney and founder of Californians for Good Governance, to break down one of the most important parents' rights cases in recent history: Mirabelli v. Bonta. We trace how California schools came to adopt policies that require staff to conceal a child's gender identity — including name and pronoun changes at school — from their own parents, and how a federal lawsuit has finally forced this issue all the way to the Supreme Court. Laura walks me through the legal history in California, from a 2014 state law that said nothing about parental secrecy to a decade of school districts acting as though it did. We discuss the December 2024 federal injunction, the Ninth Circuit's stay, and the landmark March 2025 Supreme Court opinion in which six justices made strong, unambiguous statements affirming that parents have a constitutional right to know how their children are being raised and educated. We also pull apart the arguments used to justify these secrecy policies — the abuse narrative, the suicide risk claim, and the "children's rights to privacy" framing — and show why none of them hold up to scrutiny. From a psychological standpoint, I weigh in…
More episodes of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist
- 211. Mia Hughes: Trans as an Extreme Overvalued Belief — Cracking the Code
- 210. Why Gender-Referred Youth Went From Bad to Worse: A Psychological Lens on the Finnish Study
- 209. When Schools Keep Secrets: Parental Rights, Teachers & the Supreme Court | Dean Broyles
- 208. How Sweet, Sensitive Boys Enter the Porn-Addiction-to-Transgender Pipeline | Shane Cole
- 206. The Intersex Lie: Róisín Michaux on How Queer Theory Hijacked a Rare Medical Condition
- 205. The Trifecta of Social Contagion: What Every Parent Needs to Know | my conversation with Dennison Joyce
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