California people are suddenly uniting to fight back. America First Legal sued the City of Huntington Beach and many Californian individuals last week to stop Assembly Bill 1955. The act, which California Gov. School districts are prohibited from implementing any parental-notification legislation that Governor Newsom signed into law in July that requires city teachers and personnel to contact a child’s parents if the child chooses to go by a unique name or unique class pronouns.
Newsom’s act came after a prosecutor, Michael Sachs, placed a temporary restraining order on Chino Valley Unified School District’s parental-notification legislation in 2023 and before that exact determine permanently halted the state’s parental-notification plan just this month. That this straightforward coverage has gained such acclaim demonstrates that advocates like Newsom and Sachs are developing a system based on the principle that parents are held accountable until proven innocent.
For most Americans, it seems clear that teachers and other school employees members should be notified if their child wants to change their so-called gender identity. In addition, instructors should also be required to notify parents if their child chooses to go by a unique name or using incorrect sex nouns.
Particularly considering that 78 percent of transgender-identifying people report having serious mental health problems as children, parental notification plans are in the kids ‘ best interests because a child who begins to identify as transgender will probably have problems that his relatives, not teachers, will be able to address. Then, to cut those parents out of the loop, not only deprives the parent of their rights, but also deprives the child of the mental health care that his or her parents would otherwise provide.  ,
But radical activists have relabeled common-sense parental-notification policies as “forced outing” of transgender-identified students, assuming that such policies only exist to harm students who might feel “unsafe” telling their parents about their transgender identity. Newsom’s bill, for instance, states,” Parents and families have an important role to play in the lives of young people. Studies show that LGBTQ+ youth thrive when they have parental support and feel safe sharing their full identities with them, but it can be harmful to make them do so before they are ready.
The decision to prohibit the Chino Valley Unified District from enforcing a parental-notification policy by the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, went one step further by saying,” Discrimination will not be tolerated in our educational institutions. In order to prevent children from getting medical treatment with lifelong repercussions, activists in our government have made the decision to label parental notification as discriminatory.
While activists argue that a child who decides to go by opposite-sex pronouns in school is only socially transitioning, not medically transitioning ( i. e., taking wrong-sex hormones or undergoing transgender surgery ), this distinction does n’t mean social transition is without medical consequences. As Ilya Shapiro, Leor Sapir, and John Ketcham wrote for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal,” ]F ] ar from a neutral act or polite convention, social transition is an active mental-health intervention that poses serious risks to children and adolescents. Researchers and medical professionals who treat gender-distressed youths have also expressed concern that social transition can “unnecessarily make accepting one’s sex and coming to terms with one’s body more challenging.”
Early social transition can help children develop an identity that, in the absence of affirmation, would have turned into a phase, despite medical research showing that the vast majority of children who experience sex confusion eventually come to terms with it. Moreover, social transition often sets transgender-identified people, regardless of age, on track to taking cross-sex hormones and undergoing transgender surgery. California effectively enables schools to make medical decisions for children while avoiding parents entirely by making it illegal for districts to implement transparent policies.
Activist policymakers like Gavin Newsom consider parents an afterthought not only in their children’s educations, but in their children’s lives more generally. It is often said that as California goes, so goes the nation — and, looking at the state of the Golden State’s school system, we should all be very, very worried.
Neeraja Deshpande is the coordinator for the Independent Women’s Forum ( iwf ) for the Education Freedom Center engagement. org ).