SACRAMENTO (LifeSiteNews) — California lawmakers have proposed legislation that would force educators to withhold from parents any knowledge that their children are suffering gender confusion, in the far-left state’s latest elevation of LGBT ideology over public welfare and parents’ rights.
AB 1955 “would prohibit school districts, county offices of education, charter schools, and the state special schools, and a member of the governing board or body of those educational entities, from enacting or enforcing any policy, rule, or administrative regulation that requires an employee or a contractor to disclose any information related to a pupil’s [so-called] sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by law,” according to the text.
The legislation is meant to codify a policy directive attempted last year by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom and blocked by Judge Roger Benitez as a “trifecta of harm” against children’s needs, parental rights, and teachers’ consciences.
Aggressively pro-LGBT California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond endorsed the bill, which passed the state Senate in May.
A large body of evidence shows, however, that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that full “reassignment” surgery fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such developments is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez of Los Angeles, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself in 2019 after trying to live as a man for three years.
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas.
Newsom’s California is particularly adamant about imposing LGBT dictates on all aspects of society. He has previously imposed fines on retailers who do not establish designated “gender-neutral” sections for children’s merchandise, threatened the custody of parents who refuse to affirm their children’s gender confusion, and housed self-professed “transgender” males – including sex predators – in women’s prisons.