Less than 2% of U.S. teenagers identify as transgender. It would be safe to guess that a lot of them tell their parents sooner or later; if they want any form of medical or surgical intervention, they need parental consent. Others simply feel a strong enough bond with their parents to share what’s going on and seek support.
The remainder — transgender students who are not ready to tell their parents, sometimes with very good reason — are a tiny portion of the student population. Yet in a few under-informed spots in California, you’d think that transgender secrecy was an issue as vital to public education as illiteracy.
A few school districts flouted state rules by passing requirements that teachers and other school staff tell parents about gender-identity changes by their kids, such as using different names or pronouns. The Legislature decided to put the kibosh on any such attempts to intimidate students and school employees. In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1955, which allows staff to keep students’ records about such matters confidential.
You’d think school districts would drop it and get on with the business of education. That’s what the public apparently wants. In two of those districts — Orange and Temecula Valley unified — anti-transgender board members were recalled by voters in June.
But another transgender-obsessed school board, Chino Valley Unified, is suing the state over that law. And now, the Huntington Beach City Council — no stranger to weird municipal policy — has stuck its toe into this culture war issue with a proposal to become a “Parents’ Right to Know” city.
The City Council wasted more than four hours on the subject Tuesday, giving the floor to sometimes vitriolic speakers — many of whom might not have even been city residents — with opinions on something that will have no effect. In the end, the conservative majority on the council voted to go forward with an ordinance.
The exact reach of the ordinance planned by the council isn’t clear, but the idea is to require teachers to tell parents if their kids change their gender identity. It’s unknown if it would have any effect because the city doesn’t have jurisdiction over how the schools are run. A municipal law wouldn’t go very far if it prohibited teachers from teaching algebra, for example.
Of course, on a real-life scale, many parents do know — by being the kind of parents whose kids feel comfortable telling them important things. And parents whose children are afraid to tell them because they fear rejection, or verbal or even physical abuse, aren’t going to change their kids’ gender identity as a result. The students will simply keep it a secret from all adults and become more isolated, sometimes dangerously so.
“The governor can raise his children the way he wants,” Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark said in an interview. “I will raise my children the way I want…. He needs to stick his nose out of our business.”
But it is Van Der Mark — who also was the force behind a new public-library policy that will have a panel of people who might have no library or literary expertise deciding which books the city library can buy — who is inserting her beliefs into areas where they don’t belong. The City Council does not run the schools — the school districts do. (A few districts serve Huntington Beach students.) And teachers have enough to do. It is not their job to interject themselves into potentially sensitive family matters.
Doesn’t the city have something better it could do, such as offer recreation and mental health programs that build strong and positive bonds between teenagers and their parents, so that kids feel safe sharing what’s on their minds? Or possibly even ensure that its residents have access to books deemed worthy by city librarians?
