Mick Hartley

It used to be California leading the way, bearing the light of progress – then the rest of the US, then us. Not any more. Well, let's hope not any more:

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill (AB) 1995 into law. The so-called “Safety Act” is the first in America that prevents schools from adopting any policy that would require teachers and staff to inform parents when their child wants to be referred to and treated as a member of the opposite sex or as “non-binary”.

Schools in the state were already performing secret social transitions of students in large part because of guidance from the California Department of Education that advises schools to hide this information from parents. AB 1995 is an attempt to codify these practices, empowering gender activists against their local critics.

California’s schools are going to extreme lengths to maintain this secrecy from parents. The Golden State’s Roseville Unified School District, for example, has a gender policy that assigns parents a score between 1-10 depending on how “supportive” they are predicted to be of their child’s transgender identity. A low score presumably means that the parents aren’t to be trusted with that sacred knowledge. And, of course, parents have no due process right to contest or even be made aware of the score they are assigned.

Governor Newsom has acknowledged that parents have a right to review student records, but he conveniently didn’t mention that he meant only the official records. Lawyers advising districts such as Roseville instruct schools to create separate, unofficial records for the students with “gender identities” to avoid parental detection — even when the parents employ their legal rights to obtain their student’s records.

Progressive activists frame secret gender transition policies as a simple matter of protecting student privacy and, by extension, safety against “abusive” parents. But the argument about privacy only makes sense if one subscribes to the dubious philosophical anthropology of the “transgender child”. That is, only if one assumes that some kids simply “are” trans, rather than seeing transition as a coping mechanism for underlying mental health issues, neurocognitive challenges, social adjustment problems, internalised homophobia, or identity confusion. AB 1995’s framing of these struggles, as a matter of “authentic” personal identity to be kept from parents in the name of privacy, is pointless or worse.

Worse. Apart from the vital issue of parental rights, it's taking away the most important brake on a troubled child caught up in a dangerous social contagion. This is how cults work. This how grooming works. "Let's keep it ourselves, OK? Your parents might not understand." And it's the schools doing the grooming.