A lawsuit brought by the City of Huntington Beach against California officials is opening a new front in the battle over secret social transitioning in the state’s public schools.
Parents aren’t the only ones fed up with the state usurping their authority. Huntington Beach is suing to protect its power to govern—as a self-proclaimed “Parents’ Right to Know” city—free from the state’s law that forbids parental notification when a student says they belong to the opposite sex.
Huntington Beach is one of California’s many charter cities, and as such, it claims the state’s constitution protects its autonomy.
The California public school system is a hotbed of gender indoctrination:
So it’s no wonder court battles over California’s transgender notification policies are breaking out in all directions. The pervasive gender indoctrination may also explain why, according to the lawsuit, the number of youth in California who identify as transgender is almost three times the national average.
In California, as elsewhere, all the child has to do is ask, and the school will begin using a new name and new pronouns, allow access to opposite-sex restroom facilities, and make other social changes without the parents’ knowledge or consent. The schools routinely claim this “secret social transitioning” policy is necessary to keep kids safe—from their own parents.
But, as the lawsuit also points out, social transitioning is the gateway to medical transitioning, with life-altering, permanent consequences. It is really a mental health or medical intervention, the complaint alleges, one that parents should be informed about as they would with any medical intervention involving their child.
Parental gender notification policies have been challenged throughout the country, as we’ve covered here. Typically, parents sue, claiming these policies violate their rights to be informed about their children’s wellbeing. In other cases, teachers unwilling to sell their souls to keep their jobs challenge policies that force them to look a girl in the eye and call her a “he.”
In these cases, the state is on defense against parents or teachers suing to vindicate their rights.
But in California, the state has turned on its own. Last year, when local districts defied its transgender notification bans, which then had the status of “guidance,” the state sued its own school boards—and by extension, the parents who elected them—to assert its authority. The state successfully blocked enforcement of the local parental notification policy in the case we covered here.
This past July, Governor Gavin Newsom doubled down when he signed AB 1955, the “Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act or SAFETY Act.”
As usual, the title of the Act belies its true purpose, unless you think children need to be protected from their own parents to be “safe” from “forced outing.” The law now bans school districts from creating policies requiring staff to notify parents of their children’s gender identity. It also prohibits the school from taking action against staff involved in social transitioning. The Act effectively overrides those earlier school board initiatives to restore parents’ rights by turning what was “guidance” into a mandate.
The so-called SAFETY Act was the last straw for Elon Musk, who announced he was moving his SpaceX company to Texas in protest:
And in Huntington Beach, city leaders were outraged. The municipality has joined a group of parents to challenge the California law. They ask the court to declare the “SAFETY” Act unconstitutional and block its enforcement.
Huntington Beach joins a growing list of municipalities openly defying the new Act slated to go into effect on January 1 of next year. The day it filed its lawsuit, it also passed an ordinance declaring itself a “Parents’ Right to Know” city, a direct challenge to the new law.
Huntington Beach argues that as a charter city, it’s authorized by the state Constitution to govern itself free of legislative intrusion into its municipal affairs. Those include protecting the rights of parents in its jurisdiction to know about their child’s gender identity, without the interference of the state.
From the complaint:
In short, AB 1955 makes it harder for schools to prevent secret social transitioning, harming parents, children, and communities. That’s because a child with gender dysphoria often has other mental health issues. To help their child, parents need to know what is going on. Imagine the outrage if parents were kept in the dark about a child’s epileptic seizures at school and the treatment being provided that child by school employees for that condition
The families who join Huntington Beach as plaintiffs in the lawsuit include children who, unbeknownst to their parents or even against their express wishes, were either indoctrinated with gender ideaology or actively socially “transitioned” by meddling school staff. They are all at-risk targets, coming from broken or dysfunctional homes and presenting with a host of mental health issues including autism, depression and ADHD.
They make a convincing case for treating gender identity as a “personal and private issue” between the child and the parent, not the state.
As the United States Supreme Court famously observed almost a hundred years ago, “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”
The lawsuit says neither are California’s charter cities. They are a “creature” of the California constitution, and like parents, they should be allowed to govern their own municipal affairs without the state’s intrusion.
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