California families are finally fighting back. Last week, America First Legal filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of several California families and the City of Huntington Beach to block Assembly Bill 1955. The bill, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in July, prohibits school districts from implementing any parental-notification policy requiring district teachers and staff to notify a child’s parents if that child decides to go by a different name or different pronouns in school.
Newsom’s bill came after a judge, Michael Sachs, placed a temporary restraining order on Chino Valley Unified School District’s parental-notification policy in 2023 and before that same judge permanently halted the district’s parental-notification policy just this month. That this common-sense policy has become so controversial reveals that activists like Newsom and Sachs are creating a system based on the idea that parents are guilty until proven innocent.
Indeed, for most Americans, it seems obvious that teachers and other school staff should have to notify parents if their child seeks to change his or her so-called gender identity: If teachers have to notify parents and get signed permission slips to be able to take students on field trips, teachers should also have to notify parents if their child is choosing to go by a different name or wrong-sex pronouns.
Especially seeing that 78 percent of transgender-identifying adults report that they had serious mental health issues as children, parental notification policies are in students’ best interests — a child who begins to identify
