California families are finally fighting back. Last week, America First Legal filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of several California families and the City of Huntington Beach to block Assembly Bill 1955. The bill, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in July, prohibits school districts from implementing any parental-notification policy requiring district teachers and staff to notify a child’s parents if that child decides to go by a different name or different pronouns in school.

Newsom’s bill came after a judge, Michael Sachs, placed a temporary restraining order on Chino Valley Unified School District’s parental-notification policy in 2023 and before that same judge permanently halted the district’s parental-notification policy just this month. That this common-sense policy has become so controversial reveals that activists like Newsom and Sachs are creating a system based on the idea that parents are guilty until proven innocent.

Indeed, for most Americans, it seems obvious that teachers and other school staff should have to notify parents if their child seeks to change his or her so-called gender identity: If teachers have to notify parents and get signed permission slips to be able to take students on field trips, teachers should also have to notify parents if their child is choosing to go by a different name or wrong-sex pronouns.

Especially seeing that 78 percent of transgender-identifying adults report that they had serious mental health issues as children, parental notification policies are in students’ best interests — a child who begins to identify as transgender will likely have mental health issues that his parents, not teachers, will be responsible for addressing. To cut those parents out of the loop, then, doesn’t just deprive parents of their rights; it deprives the child of the mental health care his or her parents would otherwise secure. 

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 confirm that LGBTQ+ youth thrive when they have parental support and feel safe sharing their full identities with them, but it can be harmful to force young people to share their full identities before they are ready.” 

California Attorney General Rob Bonta went one step further in celebrating the California judge’s decision to ban the Chino Valley Unified District from enforcing a parental-notification policy: “Let this decision send a clear message to other school districts that have passed or are contemplating similar policies: discriminatory policies will not be tolerated in our educational institutions.” By labeling parental notification “discriminatory,” activists in our government have decided that minors who are not old enough to sign a form are somehow able to consent to medical decisions with lifelong repercussions.

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 doesn’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 clinicians treating gender-distressed youths have similarly expressed concern that social transition can … unnecessarily make accepting one’s sex and coming to terms with one’s body more difficult.”

Although medical research has found that the overwhelming majority of children who experience confusion about their sex eventually grow out of it, early social transition can cement children into an identity that, in the absence of affirmation, would have been a phase. Moreover, social transition often sets transgender-identified people, regardless of age, on track to taking cross-sex hormones and undergoing transgender surgery. By making it illegal for districts to implement transparent policies, California is effectively allowing schools to make medical decisions for children while evading parents entirely.

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 Education Freedom Center engagement coordinator at Independent Women’s Forum (iwf.org).