Just one day after Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law, a southern California school district has filed a lawsuit challenging AB 1955, California’s “Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act or SAFETY Act.”
That’s the feel-good name politicians gave the new law forbidding schools from enacting policies that would require staff to notify parents when their children—children as young as four years old—say they want to change sex unless the children consent. It frees the schools to encourage students to transition to the opposite gender behind their parents’ backs.
The law is the latest attack in Newsom’s ongoing war against parents’ rights.
In California, as throughout the country, state educational guidance allows schools to facilitate students’ gender transitioning. At the child’s request, the school will begin using a new name, new pronouns, allow access to opposite-sex restroom facilities, and other social changes, all without the parents’ knowledge or consent. The schools routinely claim that secrecy is necessary to keep kids safe—from their parents.
Parents were also kept in the dark about the state guidance driving these policies, Assemblyman Bill Essayli said in an interview this week on Breitbart News: “We never voted on this. We never debated this. They just sort of by edict did that.”
He explained the conflict over parents’ rights leading up to this week’s lawsuit:
When it became known that California schools were concealing kids’ gender transitioning from their parents, Essayli continued, a number of local school boards took matters into their own hands and passed rules requiring parental notification.
And now, Newsom is doubling down. The new Act overrides those earlier school board initiatives to restore parents’ rights, he said.
Firing back this week, the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) is joined in its federal lawsuit by a group of parents. They claim the Act violates the parents’ constitutional rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). They ask the court to either block it or declare that the CVUSD policy requiring parental notification doesn’t violate it.
Reading through the complaint, it’s hard not to wonder whether Newsom has painted the government into a corner.
To win over public sympathy, the government always says these laws are necessary to protect trans kids’ rights. The Act declares that “[p]olicies that require outing pupils without their consent violate pupils’ rights to privacy and self-determination.”
But parents’ rights advocate Laura Powell says that’s a bogus claim:
And it’s a claim the State will no longer be able to hide behind in court. The lawsuit says there are real safety issues that arise when the government cuts children off from their parents, and the new law is in direct conflict with them:
[n]umerous studies assert that transgender and gender nonconforming students suffer from increased psychological, emotional, and physical harassment and abuse, and that transgender youth experience an abnormally high number of suicidal thoughts and make an abnormally high number of suicide attempts.
In any other circumstances, the school would normally notify parents, the lawsuit says:
For example, if a student is injured, bullied, or exhibits suicidal behavior at school, but does not want their parents to know, a school will notify the parents. If a student breaks their arm, hits their head, or develops a fever, the school will immediately tell the student’s parents. If a student is bullied or involved in a verbal or physical fight, the school will tell the parents. If a student expresses a desire to hurt or kill themself, the school will tell the parents.
But when trans students present with these potential harms, the Act carves out exceptions, according to the complaint. Without the child’s consent, schools can’t notify parents when their child may be at risk.
That puts the child at the mercy of the State.
And what if that child is a five-year-old girl who told her teacher she thinks she’s a boy? What if she needs to speak to a therapist to help her sort out her feelings? What then? Who is going to make the appointment for her? Who is going to drive her there? And who is going to pay for the visit? Not her parents—they won’t know because the school won’t tell them. The lawsuit [Par. 36] points out these practical problems with the Act as well.
The State can’t have it both ways, Powell relates here:
Given the broad consensus that transgender children are at risk for a host of harms and psychological trauma, the State’s position will be hard to defend. Even the most zealous advocates of gender transitioning for minors, the controversial World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), acknowledge that parental involvement is critical to successful patient outcome. Roundly criticized, ideologically driven, progressive WPATH is not who you might expect to find on the parents’ side of the political aisle.
Nonetheless, the plaintiffs find support in their policies:
WPATH recognizes that “social transition for children typically can only take place with the support and acceptance of parents/caregivers.”…Their guidelines recommend “involving parent(s) or primary caregiver(s) in the assessment process . . . in almost all situations,” and add that “including parent(s)/caregiver(s) in the assessment process to encourage and facilitate increased parental understanding and support of the adolescent may be one of the most helpful practices available.”
That should tell the court all it needs to know when it reviews California’s latest government overreach. By taking their parents out of the picture, the “SAFETY Act” endangers the children it promises to protect.
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