California’s AB 1955 shoots down any and all transgender notification policies in schools

Democrat lawmakers in the California legislature are serious about removing parents’ right to raise their own kids.

The Sacramento Bee has the story.

Yesterday, a group of California legislators unveiled AB 1955, a gut-and-amend bill that will prohibit schools from implementing transgender notification policies.

It seems parents asserting their right to parent is just too much for these power happy autocrats, who clearly know better.

More than a dozen California school districts are right now considering commonsense policies that would require teachers to notify parents if their child identifies as transgender at school.

AB 1955 will torpedo these efforts.

Assemblyman Chris Ward, D-San Diego, makes no bones about his intentions with the bill, saying outright that he plans to gut and amend AB 1955 to ban the pro-parent policies.

Learn about gut-and-amend bills here.

Assemblyman Ward says AB 1955 will specifically prohibit any school employee or contractor from being required to disclose any information — even to parents — related to a child’s identity, orientation, or gender expression, without that child’s consent.

Ward also says the measure would protect teachers from any “retaliation” on the basis that the employee supported a student who is transgender, as well as provide support and resources for families who express interest in working towards acceptance of a child’s transgender identity.

In other words, acceptance and affirmation of children’s gender dysphoria is the only allowable pathway of care, as mandated by the State.

Heavy handed? Absolutely.

AB 1955 bursts on the legislative scene nine months after California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued a school district for enacting a transgender notification policy, and just a week after Bonta’s attorney made the bombshell admission in court that, in fact, school boards are not required to follow the California Department of Education’s school secrecy policy.

AB 1955 will change that.

Just eight days ago, AG Bonta’s attorney, Emmanuelle Soichet, said in the U.S. District Court, “And, specifically, to answer your question about who has enforcement power over those guidelines, those are nonenforceable guidelines, so there’s no one on the state who’s actually going to enforce those guidelines….

“And to the extent that [the Escondido Union School District] believed it had to follow those guidelines as a mandate of state law, that -- that is just an incorrect assumption.”

In their original lawsuit, two teachers challenged the Escondido Unified School District’s requirement that “school employees treat student’s transgender or gender-nonconforming identities as private information that cannot be shared with others — including other teachers, parents and guardians — without express permission from the student. Teachers were also instructed to use the pronouns matching the students' identity.”

The two teachers said in their lawsuit, "Morally and religiously, they know that the complex issues of gender dysphoria and gender identity are not issues best left for children to figure out on their own, with no parental involvement whatsoever.”

“The attorney general has admitted that he doesn't have the constitutional authority to enforce or stop these [secrecy] policies because it's not legal. Full stop," said Lance Christensen, the vice president for education policy of the California Policy Center.

Interestingly, U.S. District Court judge Roger Benitez, who is presiding over the teachers' lawsuit, found that the San Diego school district's secret gender transition policy violated the U.S. Constitution on 1st and 14th Amendment grounds.

Could the same judicial finding apply to AB 1955?

Regarding the admission by Bonta’s attorney, California Assemblyman Bill Essayli (AD63) said, “From day one when we started our parental rights movement last year, we knew the law was clear and there was no statute requiring schools to keep secrets from parents.”

Well, now AB 1955 is that statute, if passed into law.

The California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus has published a fact sheet.

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