California Faces Wave of Lawsuits Over Gender Identity Notification in Schools
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.
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.
"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."
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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.
"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.
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.
In response to a request for comment, a senior official with the Newsom administration told The Epoch Times that parents are guaranteed the right to access their students' educational records.
The official stated the new law strengthens existing protections against "forced outings," ensures that school staff don't interfere with the parent-child relationship by forcing families to have conversations about identity, doesn't allow a student's name or gender identity to be changed on an official school record without parental consent, and doesn't "undermine parents' rights."
"They can't say that with a straight face. It's simply not true, and that's why we're fighting it," she told The Epoch Times. "This is a clearly unconstitutional law."
"School officials do not have the right to keep secrets from parents, but parents do have a constitutional right to know what their minor children are doing at school," Rae said in a statement on July 17.
Parents have long had the right to go into classrooms and to request student records, but parental notification policies make it easier for parents by notifying them, Rae said.
"Most parents would have to take time off work to go sit in their kids' classroom or go through the lengthy administrative process of requesting records, which a lot of parents do, but not all parents can," Rae said.
The teachers sued the K-8 school district and the California Department of Education for policies requiring teachers to use "pronouns or a gender-specific name requested by a student" at school, while "reverting to biological pronouns and legal names when speaking with parents in order to actively hide information about a child's gender identity from his or her parents."
The judge granted a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case, blocking EUSD from enforcing the guidelines.
The policy "harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse," Benitez wrote.
"It harms the parents by depriving them of the long recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children. And finally, it harms plaintiffs [teachers] who are compelled to violate the parent's rights by forcing plaintiffs to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students—violating plaintiffs' religious beliefs."
Paul Jonna of the Thomas More Society, the lead attorney in the case, said the ruling should have compelled the state government to rescind policies that prevent school districts from passing notification policies.
Instead, he said, "they've doubled down on policies that they've been told are illegal."
Jonna said he's not surprised to see more litigation over AB 1955.
"Children can be gay, but they cannot be born wrong," Friday said.
The state uses terms "coming out" and "forced outing" to conflate gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth with those who identify as transgender, she said.
But, she said, the LGB and T are not the same, because unlike trans-identified youth, LGB youth aren't put on a path toward psychological and medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones or transition surgeries.
None of the parental notification policies deal with sexual orientation. They only focus on children distressed over their natural bodies, said Friday, whose teenage daughter formerly identified as "trans."
"That's what parents want to know about because it's that distress that makes the child more susceptible to ... a heightened risk of suicidality," she said.
The narrative that parental notification policies discriminate against trans-identified students is "quite nonsensical" she said, because parents are routinely notified when their child "wants an aspirin at school" or is truant, struggling with bad grades, or gets into a fight at school, but not in the case of gender dysphoria.
And, while some parents could potentially "react poorly" to any of those scenarios, the narrative that trans-identified children are at greater risk from abuse at the hands of their own parents is exaggerated, she said.
The question judges must grapple with in all of these cases is whether parents have a fundamental right to know if their child is suffering from gender dysphoria, she said.
The least harmful path for gender dysphoric children is for parents to get involved and encourage them to find comfort in their natural bodies so they can "grow up with their bodies intact ... without removing healthy body parts and sterilizing themselves," Friday said.
"The whole premise for AB 1955 is that parents abuse their children when they learn that they are struggling with gender, and that is a falsehood. Where is the data on it? It has never been produced," she said. "It's just not happening."
However, Child Protective Services currently investigates parents who don't affirm their child's trans identity and resist calling their children by preferred names or pronouns, accusing parents of emotional abuse.
"So, this is the new frontier. The same thing happened to me," she said. "It's happening all over, not just in California."
In some cases schools have allegedly created "shadow files" under a child's different identity to deceive parents, she said.
In the case of her own daughter, Friday says she was denied access to such shadow files, she said.
"These schools have been advised by their school board attorneys to create shadow files—fake files, so that they can skirt federal law and state law that requires them to provide student information when a parent asks for it," she said.
"It's all by design."
