Judge Roger T. Benitez

As Solari has been tracking, the Trump administration took many terrible actions in 2025 to build out a digital control grid. However, positive steps taken on the gender front must also be acknowledged. The president hit the ground running in January with executive orders “restoring biological truth to the federal government,” “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” and “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling.”

The month of December witnessed an additional tsunami of actions in this area. HHS Secretary Kennedy rounded out the year with an announcement of proposed regulatory actions to end the pediatric practice of “sex-rejecting procedures” (including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations) by barring hospitals that perform such procedures on minors from participating in Medicare and Medicaid. In addition, the House on Dec. 17 passed the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” sponsored by former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which would criminalize such procedures, with Greene posting on X, “Children are NOT experiments.”

Finally, on Dec. 22, federal Judge Roger Benitez (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California) joined the fray on the legal front, issuing a decisive class-action ruling against California policies that allow schools to hide children’s gender transitions from their parents. Among the “trifecta of harms” (to children, parents, and teachers) attributed to the parental exclusion policies by Judge Benitez, the judge emphasized the unconstitutionality of such policies:

“[The policies] harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children, and by substantially burdening many parents’ First Amendment right to train their children in their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West initiated the lawsuit that led to the ruling; “[r]ecognizing the sweeping nature of the constitutional violations, the Court certified the lawsuit as a class action.” Before granting December’s permanent injunction barring California officials from enforcing the state’s anti-parent gender transition policies, Judge Benitez had granted a preliminary injunction in 2023. He observed, “California’s education policymakers may be experts on primary and secondary education but they would not receive top grades as students of Constitutional Law.”

The Havana-born judge, who has served on the U.S. District Court since 2003, has also stood up legally for the Second Amendment on multiple occasions.

Last year’s seismic shift in gender politics is in sync with public opinion. A February 2025 Pew Research Center survey  found that notable majorities favor laws and policies that, for example, require athletes to compete on teams that match their birth-assigned sex, ban health care professionals from performing gender transition procedures on minors, and make gender identity indoctrination in elementary schools illegal.