California Court Blocks School District’s Gender Notification Policy
The states’ war on school boards is a war on parents. In California, parents are fighting back.
Are parents a threat to their own children? A California court says “yes.”
Last Wednesday, a California judge temporarily blocked the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) from notifying parents when their children request to be identified or treated as a gender other than their biological sex. Ruling from the bench, Superior Court Judge Thomas Garza granted the temporary restraining order (TRO) requested by the State in its lawsuit over the district’s transgender notification policy filed late last month.
The California decision comes just weeks after a similar ruling in New Jersey, where the State sued three of its own school boards to halt their parental notification policies. The New Jersey court temporarily blocked them while the legal proceedings play out. We covered that case here,
When New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy was asked on Face the Nation how he justified overriding the school boards’ authority to keep parents informed about their children, he played it down:
Parents are always involved. In our administration, they’re always at the table, and they always will be. … Obviously, parents are the existential reality in the upbringing of any child without question. I don’t deny that for one second.
Murphy’s words fell flat on the parents in those districts. They were outraged. The State’s attack on their duly elected school boards was an attack on them.
Parents in California are no more eager to sign their children over to the state than parents in New Jersey. Jonathan Zachreson, co-founder of parent advocacy group Protect Kids California, says his organization’s research shows parental notification policies are widely supported by both parties:
Our polling that we’ve done was very specific to this question: Do you believe that parents should be notified that their kids are being treated as a different gender at school? It’s like 68-69% of California voters, including almost two thirds of Democrats say yes.
Similar polling in New Jersey came up with 77% support for notifying parents when their children assert a change in gender.
“As long as you frame the issue as parental rights,” Zachreson says, “you’re going to win and the other side is going to lose.”
But when the queston is framed as “Do you support limiting LGBTQ+ rights?” then most people will say no.
Rob Bonta, California’s Attorney General—and likely contender in the next race for Governor—of course knows this. In his statement announcing the lawsuit against the district, he called its policy a “forced outing” policy targeting trans kids, instead of what it really is—a parental notification policy:
We’re in court challenging Chino Valley Unified’s forced outing policy for wrongfully and unconstitutionally discriminating against and violating the privacy rights of LGBTQ+ students. The forced outing policy wrongfully endangers the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of non-conforming students who lack an accepting environment in the classroom and at home. Our message to Chino Valley Unified and all school districts in California is loud and clear: We will never stop fighting for the civil rights of LGBTQ+ students.
Shifting the narrative away from parents’ rights toward the more popular LGBTQ+ rights gives Bonta a chance at winning, at least with his base.
California Considers All Parents a Danger To Their Own Children
But when Bonta promotes the lawsuit as an LGBTQ+ kids’ rights crusade, he just forces the State into another tight spot: To make its case, it has to take the perverse position that parents are a danger to their own children. The State’s complaint says those children have rights, including privacy rights—to keep things from their parents, with whom they are presumptively “unsafe.”
How do we know this? Their children say so.
To support its argument that keeping parents informed will cause irreparable harm to students, the State’s Memorandum (pp. 8-14) relies on subjective assertions of feelings such as these, presented as “fact”:
A current CVUSD student stated, “[t]his policy threatens my safety” and “tells me I don’t belong.” …. The student explained:
52 percent of trans kids feel accepted at school, but only 35 percent feel accepted at home. That leaves a large gap there of kids who feel welcome at school but not at home. Feeling safe at school lessens suicide risk. If a student isn’t out to their parent, [the Policy] shoves them “in the closet” at school.
…
A letter from a transgender student … explained: ‘If a student is outed to their family without their consent, this could possibly result in abuse, hate crimes, getting kicked out of their homes, [and] in extreme cases, being murdered.’
…
As one CVUSD teacher put it starkly: “This policy will out a student . . . putting them into a hostile household, which will further their mental degradation to the point where they will harm themselves. . . . This policy will kill somebody.”
In other words, no child is safe once his parent knows he struggles with his gender.
But there’s no evidence that parents are a danger to their kids when they’re going through gender struggles, California Assemblyman Bill Essayli told Fox News:
California parents are not backing down to the bullying tactics of the Attorney General. Last night another school board joined our movement to protect parental rights. Children are the domain of their parents, not the government. Thank you @SandraSmithFox for having me on “Your… pic.twitter.com/UP0j6DiidI
— Bill Essayli (@billessayli) September 8, 2023
And we shouldn’t trust the sort of science the California complaint relies on to say that parents are a danger to trans kids, Chad Felix Greene explains at The Federalist:
The truth is, we simply cannot say what does and does not “cause” suicide in youth and we can only speculate based on the self-reports of anonymous survey takers, assuming their reports are accurate. What we can determine, however, is that there is no objective evidence to suggest increasing parental involvement in schools and restricting advanced adult education on sexuality causes distress or suicidality, certainly not in children under the age of 10.
The California court’s TRO is a temporary remedy that must be based on a showing of irreparable harm—not claims of hurt feelings based on junk science. Whether the court will follow with a preliminary injunction halting the district’s policy remains to be seen next month, when it holds hearing to examine the record in more detail.
Meanwhile, Zachreson believes the TRO application granted by the all-too-willing judge against the CVUSD is an intimidation tactic by the State, which has also launched a civil rights investigation into the district. The State is hoping other school districts contemplating their own parental notification policies will see what happened to Chino and think twice before adopting them.
CA Parents Coalition “Has Nothing To Do With Party Affiliation”
But the State may have underestimated the growing coalition of parents fighting to reclaim their rights to safeguard their own children.
Protect Kids California co-founder Erin Friday, a Democrat whose own child was secretly transitioned by her public school, says the pushback is bipartisan—“It has nothing to do with party affiliation whatsoever.”
“The [Democrat] party is just not listening to us. They want to frame this [as] ‘right versus left.’ This is about child safeguarding. It has nothing to do with party affiliation whatsoever.” – @ErinFriday75490 pic.twitter.com/cBQmvyZ4x0
— Jonathan Zachreson (@JZachreson) September 5, 2023
And Zachreson says school boards now run by newly elected conservative members are not intimidated by the State’s bullying tactics. “It may stop people to a certain degree, he says, “but for these people who have already been working on this, it’s not going to slow them down.”
In fact, as we were speaking last Thursday night, the Orange County School Board became the sixth California school district to pass a parental notification policy:
BREAKING: @OrangeUnifiedCA becomes the sixth school district in California to pass a parental notification policy on a vote of 4-0-3.
The three other school board members left in protest when the president refused to shut down the meeting after opponents to the policy… pic.twitter.com/jZCR32M6mB
— Jonathan Zachreson (@JZachreson) September 8, 2023
Even one of the students spoke out in strong favor of the new policy, Zachreson tweeted/posted that night:
Wow! Student school board member Alex Tran speaks out in strong favor of the parental notification policy. He originally intended to oppose it. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/GUrqB6UMqm
— Jonathan Zachreson (@JZachreson) September 8, 2023
Zachreson thinks the trend will continue because the school boards aren’t backing down:
It is a new paradigm that, frankly, they don’t know how to deal with because, you sue a school district, and they used to settle right away, because it’s too costly to deal with the state. You didn’t used to hear about a school district that is willing to take this all the way to the Supreme Court.
And he predicts it won’t end well. As journalist Jennifer Van Laar tweeted/posted after Orange County passed its policy, the message from the California school boards to the State is clear: “Sue us all.”
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Comments
“Do you think schools should administer Tylenol without parental notice?”
“Do you think schools should administer drugs to chemically castrate without parental notice?”
We already know the answer to the first question is that they cannot. Your school nurse can’t give a tylenol or ibuprofen for a headache without parental consent.
IMO, Zacherson makes the key point in the article; if the School Boards and Parents hold firm and require the State to ‘make them’ comply things get much more dicey and far more costly for the State. Sooner or later one of the School Boards or Parents groups will draw a more sympathetic Judge. In any event by forcing lawfare they get discovery and depositions which may also help make the case, in public opinion if not in CT, of how radical the proponents of this totalitarianism actually are.
A California court says “yes.”
No quotes on “yes.” It’s indirect statement.
“The State knows best.” That’s the essence of the vile Dumb-o-crats’ obnoxiously totalitarian argument for brazenly and lawlessly usurping and undermining parents’ rights.
“We’re better guardians of your kids than you are.”
How about forced transgender surgery for all the politicians supporting it. I’d even toss a couple bucks toward the surgery, but not the anesthesia. They can do the surgery without that.
Laura Ingraham had interesting and disturbing segment with Jeanette Cooper. This lady lost custody of her teenage daughter because she would not affirm the girls gender identity. (born a boy) I looked it up, and it was during a custody dispute, with her ex, and the girl’s stepmother, a psychotherapist. They claimed the girl was being endangered.. etc etc.
The kernel of the issue, is whether a parent has rights.. it is more complicated after a divorce, and parents oppose eachother, but the basic question is about parental rights. Obviously the state of CA says no..
I am wondering if this is question for SCOTUS. SMH
The thing is, the whole point of custody hearings is to establish which parent has those exact legal rights. There is no question it’s one of them or someone legally appointed by the court.
Oopsy. Should have unbolded after the first sentence. Sorry about yelling.
So, first, if parents are a threat to their children, there’s an agency and a process for that. And, despite the generally acknowledged awfulness of both, it does include due process. If parents are a danger to their child because they don’t “affirm” their child’s groomed “gender”, then you should remove the child via said process and agency. But they do not want to expose themselves to legal scrutiny – which means they ARE grooming these children and abusing them.
Second, why would these parents and school board not immediately sue the state gov’t for promoting child abuse and other issues over this? Are they prevented because it’s already in litigation? Could they wait until the end of that litigation then sue for accessory to child molestation? (I’m sure the legal pedant answer is “No,” but it would be nice to know why that’s not horribly immoral.)
Sadly, the Orwellian “due process” (cutting across all State agencies) obviously assumes a parent who objects to child butchery is guilty of “trans abuse,” unless the parent/parents can prove themselves innocent—the only acceptable proof being to acquiesce to Official State Policy that requires child butchery.
So why aren’t they using that mechanism? “Oh, your parents don’t support your ‘transition’? Well, we’ll take you away from them, if they’re that awful.”
Because they know the moment they pull that the entire policy will get trashed by law and public opinion. But, until they do that, their arguments about danger to the children is without any merit whatsoever. And they should be challenged on that basis.
The state of CA appears to believe that the only parent with any rights over their child is the mothers right to kill it in the womb. After that it is the states kid to raise while you fund it.
Is that ‘neither fish nor fowl’ bathroom sign real?
There are plenty of morons in black robes. It is clear this one’s only concern was figuring out how to support whatever the State wanted to do. If fast-tracking mentally confused students to butchers for chemical and eventually surgical mutilation and hiding that from parents is “caring,” then rape is a “social event,” and robbing the convenience store is a “financial transaction.” California is definitely Bizzaro World, and sadly there are plenty of other judges across the nation equally enthusiastic about leftist child sacrifice.
If you haven’t read Aldous Huxley’s book “Brave New World,” then download it and read it. If you have but it’s been a long time ago, reread it. If you’ve read it and remember what it said, you know what I mean.
It’s here and it will consume us if we aren’t prepared to fight back.
.