Reprising Jack Nicholson’s character in 1992’s A Few Good Men, California governor Gavin Newsom did a fine impression last week of Colonel Nathan Jessup’s defiant line: “You can’t handle the truth!” The governor may have been merely acting to benefit his political base, but the burden of his action will fall on California families and parents with children in public schools.
Last Monday, Newsom signed into law AB 1955, which prohibits public schools from requiring their employees to disclose information about a student’s “sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” to another person, including a family member, without the pupil’s consent. The rule is the latest escalation in the state’s push to substitute itself for parents.
For the past decade, the California Department of Education has encouraged school districts to conceal from parents when a child has adopted a different gender identity at school, lest he suffer “harassment” at home. Last fall, California attorney general Rob Bonta sued a district because its policies required school officials to share such changes with parents and guardians. The state’s filings allege that “out[ing]” a child to his family could “compromise the student’s safety” by “increasing the student’s vulnerability to harassment, violence, or other forms of abuse at school or at home.”
While California is the first state to ban schools from notifying parents if a child changes his gender identity, its bureaucrats are not alone in pushing the idea that parental notification results in child abuse. Last fall, for example, New Jersey attorney general Matt Platkin sued a school district to block its policy requiring parental notification, arguing that such a policy would “expose . . . students to the potential for severe harms to their safety and mental health.”
Why don’t bureaucrats and policymakers trust parents with information about their children’s gender identity? Educational polices regularly require officials to notify parents when kids are being bullied, are at risk of suicide, or have a significant illness or injury. These gender-identity policies are the exception rather than the rule. Is there research demonstrating a clear causal link between parental notification and child abuse?
Advocates for trans-identifying children insist that there is; they point to surveys and studies showing that such youth are overrepresented in foster care, juvenile detention, and homeless shelters and exhibit high rates of suicidal ideation. Additionally, children and adolescents who identify as transgender are more likely to have histories of mental illness or autism and to have suffered abuse. There is scant evidence, however, to bolster the claim that “coming out” to a parent significantly raises a child’s risk of abuse or self-harm. As a recent study on the link between parental rejection and suicidal ideation among trans-identifying youth noted, research on the causes of increased suicide risk among these children “is still in its infancy.”
Absent definitive evidence that gender-identity notification policies harm kids, how can schools justify not disclosing this information to parents? How healthy is it for a child to have one gender identity, name, and set of pronouns at school, and another at home? Leading such a double life is bound to create intense psychological strain. For parents and children to build the type of supportive relationship that advocates say is critical for these kids to thrive, transparency is essential. Do policymakers hope that children will never tell their parents, and lead these secret lives until they graduate and move away from home?
Parents of young adults know how challenging it can be to have difficult conversations with teenagers. We tend to invest our kids with our own dreams, and we’re disappointed to find that they have forged a different path. Sometimes, that path makes us anxious. But most such parent-child conflicts ease over time as we recalibrate and renew the relationship.
In the end, there is hope that this law will not stand. Parents have a fundamental right to raise their children, and the state cannot withhold critical information from them absent clear evidence that the information will place the child in imminent danger of abuse. Parents have the right under federal law to access their children’s educational records, and this law not only attempts to hide information from parents but also encourages school personnel to lie. This past September, a federal court in California found preliminarily that a policy preventing gender identity disclosure to parents violated both the parents’ rights to raise their children and teachers’ rights to share truthful information with parents. One would hope that more educators will use their First Amendment rights to let parents know when there’s an issue.
Newsom is a politician with his own purposes in signing this awful bill. But parents, in the words of Tom Cruise’s character, are entitled to answers. They can handle the truth.
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