AB1955 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Students and Parents
On July 15th, Governor Newsom signed AB1955 into law, a radical overreach that strips parents of their right to know if their child identifies publicly in school as a gender other than their biological sex. This law mandates that schools force teachers to intentionally keep parents in the dark about a profound aspect of their child’s life—one that directly impacts their mental health and is associated with an increased risk of suicide. Supporters claim it protects children's privacy and prevents “forced outings,” but at what cost? While the context of this law is happens to be transgenderism, don’t be distracted from the real issue: California’s latest attempt to separate parents from their children using a controversial issue as the wedge.
There are moral, legal, and pragmatic reasons why AB1955 is not just problematic—it's dangerous.
From a moral standpoint, AB1955 implies that parents are harmful influences in their children's lives. Why else keep such significant information a secret? This assumption portrays parents as obstacles to their child’s health and happiness, rather than as loving caregivers who have raised them since birth. It ultimately serves to alienate and separate children from their parents, placing them under the care of the State to “protect” them. This law sets a dangerous precedent of actively keeping secrets from parents about their children.
Legally, this law is doomed to fail. In September 2023, this exact scenario played out in the Escondido Unified School District where the case Mirabelli v. Olson EUSD was brought before the US District Court. In an early decision in that case, the judge wrote, “Parental involvement is essential to the healthy maturation of schoolchildren.” He continued, saying that the school’s policy of forcing teachers to keep secrets from parents “is a trifecta of harm: it harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention...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 [teachers] who are compelled to violate the parent's rights by forcing [teachers] to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students…”
This law will certainly be challenged in court at the state level and likely also at the district level, which will divert taxpayer dollars away from educating our kids and instead toward covering unnecessary legal fees.
In addition to education dollars lost to lawyers, there is another major pragmatic reason this law is bad for kids. Parents who rightly feel this law oversteps the State’s legal authority and infringes on their rights will pull their children from public schools, which will reduce school funding. Enrollment in California public schools has been on a steady decline for several years and this law will likely hasten that pace. In the most public example of this departure, Elon Musk wrote: “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
Here in the South Bay, our state representative, Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, who is the chair of both the Education and Aerospace Committees, had a rough week. In one fell swoop he created a statewide education fiasco and drove a major aerospace company out of the State. It’s no wonder that AB1955 is conspicuously missing from his Instagram posts while he proudly touts several other of his bills.
On July 27th, Muratsuchi held a town hall at Hesse Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. I took the opportunity to ask him about AB1955. In his response, he described AB1955 inaccurately. He simply said it prohibits school districts from requiring school staff to notify parents if their child demonstrates signs of changing their gender identity. The actual text of the law has a subtle, but important difference. It says that a school district shall not enact a rule that would require an employee to disclose any information related to a pupil’s gender identity without the pupil’s consent. Here’s a good time to talk about FERPA, or the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA is a federal law that gives parents the right to have access to their children’s education records, and the congressional record pretty clearly states that parents need access to this kind of information to protect the interests of their child.
It was clear that Muratsuchi wanted to make AB1955 just about the specific issue of gender identity while completely neglecting the part of the law about needing the child’s consent. This is important because neither FERPA nor the California or federal constitution designate a child’s right to privacy from their parents. So AB1955 is trying to create an exemption where none exists, and it directly conflicts with a federal law. When a state law and a federal law are in direct conflict, the federal law wins.
Muratsuchi then spent the next two minutes talking about how parents should talk to their kids more, which just served to distract from real issue with this law and got a few friendly cheers from the crowd. Then I brought him back to the issue by bringing up Escondido and Mirabelli v Olson. The judge in that case also wrote: The Escondido Unified School District “argues that [their policy] does not infringe on plaintiffs’ religious beliefs at all because the policy does not require plaintiffs to ‘lie’ to parents. But that cannot be fairly said when the policy requires plaintiffs to conceal from parents, by misdirection and substitution, accurate information about their child's use of a new name, gender, or pronouns at school.”
The policy that Escondido enacted required confidentiality and non-disclosure regarding a student’s gender identification. In other words, it required consent from the child before disclosing that information to parents.
One of the main arguments against AB1955 is that a logical outcome of the law is that it would require teachers to lie to parents. Muratsuchi denied that allegation, saying that teachers were always free to talk to parents about their child’s gender identity if the teacher wanted to. But according to AB1955, this is not true. The key phrase is “without the pupil’s consent.” So school administrators reading this law could reasonably interpret it like this: “Not only can I not proactively tell parents if their child is publicly identifying as another gender, even if those parents directly ask me about their child, I cannot answer them unless their child gives me consent first.”
One of the defenses of AB1955 is that it is “passive,” meaning that it only prohibits school districts from requiring teachers to report a student’s gender identity to their parents. But the subtle reality of the text of the law is that it does NOT prohibit school districts from prohibiting teachers from reporting. In other words, a school district could enact the exact same policy that Escondido enacted and it would be totally legal, according to AB1955. But as we saw in Mirabelli v. Olson, that kind of policy is doomed to fail. In the end, I believe AB1955 will be struck down in court and it will have been an enormous waste of time and money.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bring that fight. I strongly believe that the people that care most for children are their parents, not administrators, and not politicians. AB1955 sets a dangerous precedent of erecting an administrative barrier in between parents and their kids. We have a duty to fight against those that want to create even more barriers. When I’m elected to the Palos Verdes School Board, I will resist and reject immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional laws like AB1955. Kids have a right to a safe learning environment. Parents have a right to be fully informed and involved with their kids’ education. I will fight to protect those rights.
