A mother’s tears of worry and frustration over her 17-year-old daughter’s secret social gender transition at school tell the story of what many parents are facing in California schools.
“I cry every day, not only for my daughter but for the parents that are now contacting me about their kids,” one Los Angeles County mom told The Epoch Times on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity.
Under the pseudonym, Lena, she said her daughter, Hannah—also a pseudonym—suffered from gender dysphoria and was secretly socially transitioned at school.
Lena is one of several parents representing nine families that joined a lawsuit filed by the City of Huntington Beach against state officials over a new law that bans parental notification policies, effectively prohibiting school staff from revealing social gender transitions of students to their parents without the child’s consent.
California is the only state to enact such a law.
Unbeknown to her parents, Hannah began secretly identifying as “trans” in 2020, when she was 13, after spending a lot of time on social media platforms.
She was homeschooled until the ninth grade when she attended public high school and is now in her senior year.
In 2021, as Lena was cleaning her daughter’s bedroom, she was shocked to find a sketchbook that contained Hannah’s drawings depicting self-mutilation, suicide ideation, and the bloody aftermath of gender transition surgeries.
“I’m going through her books, and I see very disturbing pictures of her bloody body cut up, saying, ‘I need to come out. I need to pick a name, and I need to tell my parents I’m trans. I want to be on testosterone. I want top surgery,’” Lena said.
She knew something was seriously wrong, and wanted to talk with Hannah but said it took a few weeks to find the right words and broach the sensitive subject.
“I told her what I found and that we love her, and we don’t care what sexual orientation she is as she grows into herself, but she’s not trans,” Lena said.
Lena told her daughter she is female down to her DNA chromosomes and that she and her husband will only call her by her birth name, she said.
After the talk, Hannah agreed to not use the male name—only her birth name—at school, but at the end of the school year when students’ work was showcased online for parents to see, Lena noticed a male name on a biology assignment.
At the start of the academic year, school staff had asked Hannah for her preferred name and pronouns and began socially transitioning her to a male name and identity, Lena said.
According to the complaint, the principal allegedly pulled Hannah aside for a meeting to tell her that school staff were not allowed to tell her parents about the social transition.
As she entered tenth grade in 2022, teachers and administrators continued referring to Hannah by a male name, and Lena was repeatedly denied meetings with the school principal to discuss the situation, so Lena began speaking out at school board meetings. By the end of the school year, the school district agreed to inform Lena if her daughter ever resumed using a male name.
The next year, Hannah again used a masculine name, prompting the principal to arrange a meeting with Lena. Then, after repeated communications from Lena’s attorney and a written statement signed by Hannah agreeing to use her legal name and female pronouns, the school agreed to stop calling Hannah by a male name and pronouns, Lena said.
But Lena said she fears that once California’s Assembly Bill 1955 goes into effect in January, “it will undermine her hard-won contractual rights, her parental rights, and her ability to protect her daughter,” according to the complaint.
“If I had known that they socially transition kids at school behind parents back, I would have never put her in public school,” Lena said. “I will never give up on her or any child. ... She is my child—not the school’s, the state’s, or this country’s.”
Hannah no longer identifies as “trans,” Lena said.
Public Pushback
Assembly Bill (AB) 1955, also known as the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act, which is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2025, bans “parental notification policies,” which have been enacted by more than a dozen California school districts.
Controversy over AB 1955 made national headlines when Elon Musk, whose son identifies as a transgender woman, called the new law “the final straw” when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law in mid-July.
Musk vowed to move the headquarters of his companies SpaceX and social media platform X out of state to Texas.
In the Huntington Beach and parents’ case against Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and State Superintendent of Public Schools Tony Thurmond, Lena is referred to as “1A” and Hannah is called “1C.”
Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark told The Epoch Times the city—which declared itself a “Parents’ Right to Know” city in September—decided to sue the state to assist parents who want to overturn the state law.
“We have no jurisdiction over schools, but we represent everyone in the City of Huntington Beach, including the parents,” Van Der Mark said. “It’s about our parental rights and the state chipping away at [them] and trying to raise our children for us.”
Van Der Mark, elected to the city council in 2022, said defending parental rights is what led her into politics. She said parents have told her their children were exposed to material in schools that forced them to have discussions about sex and gender ideology before they were ready.
Schools are now having these conversations with children at younger and younger ages, she said.
“Whether it’s gender or whether it’s depression, anxiety, it is our right as parents to handle these issues, and that’s been taken from us,” Van Der Mark said.
The state doesn’t have to like the way parents raise their children, but it’s bound by law to respect parental authority, she said.
“To us, it’s about … protecting our children before it’s too late—before they go out and mutilate their bodies,” she said.
Burdening teachers who don’t have counseling or psychiatric credentials with the “huge responsibility” of dealing with issues as serious as gender dysphoria also isn’t fair and puts them in a “bad situation,” Van Der Mark said.
Proponents of AB 1955 said that notifying parents without a child’s consent is a “forced outing,” and puts children who identify as transgender at risk of abuse and suicide.
Van Der Mark questioned the argument.
“Who exactly do you think you’re outing them to?” she asked.
If a boy wants to identify as a girl, changes his name and wears a dress to school, and other children tell their parents who then tell the neighbors, the only ones kept in the dark are the boy’s parents, she said.
“You’re not really outing them to anyone, because everyone is going to know except the parents,” she said.
The legal complaint states that according to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, gender dysphoria is a mental health disorder, and as such, parents should be notified.
The new state law sets no age limit on banning parental notification, so “schools cannot notify parents even if preschoolers socially transition,” the complaint states.
The law also prevents schools from disciplining staff who initiate or facilitate social gender transitioning, “which courts have recognized is a type of medical intervention or treatment,” the lawsuit argues.
“A child with gender dysphoria often has other mental health issues. To help their child, parents need to know what is going on,” the complaint states.
“Imagine the outrage if parents were kept in the dark about a child’s epileptic seizures at school and the treatment being provided that child by school employees for that condition.”
State Response
Newsom, Bonta, and Thurmond did not respond to specific requests for comment about the Huntington Beach lawsuit and other related court cases.
“While we are unable to comment on ongoing litigation, Attorney General Bonta is committed to providing his unwavering support to ensure every student has the right to learn and thrive in a school environment that promotes safety, privacy, and inclusivity,” the attorney general’s office stated in an email to the Epoch Times.
Bonta’s office highlighted a January legal alert issued by his office notifying education officials and institutions that “forced outing policies” violate the California Constitution and state laws prohibiting discrimination and safeguarding students’ right to privacy.
“The SAFETY Act,” Bonta said in an emailed statement in July, “reaffirms that forced outing policies and any form of retaliation against teachers, parents, and allies who protect students against such constitutional and statutory harms are a clear violation of state law.”
The attorney general commended the LGBTQ Caucus for prioritizing the bill “to ensure no student is ever forcibly outed against their will, especially when such disclosure could result in serious harm.”
In July, Thurmond also celebrated the signing of AB 1955.
“I am proud to work alongside our legislators who have courageously championed the privacy rights of our most vulnerable students, and whose partnership has helped ensure that this bill made it to the Governor’s desk for signing,” he said in a statement.
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