While most of America’s attention this week has been focused on major national political headlines, a newly enshrined law in California has passed under the radar. But its significance for Christian parents everywhere shouldn’t be ignored.
On Monday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 1955—a first-in-nation bill that bans California school districts from requiring staff to disclose to parents if their child starts using different pronouns or identifying as a different gender. The bill passed the Democrat-dominated state legislature in June (by a 60–15 vote), but only after a heated floor debate that nearly came to blows.
Described by the California Family Council as “a bill that creates a government-imposed wall of secrecy between parents and their children,” AB 1955 directly rebuffs conservative school boards across the state that had established policies requiring schools to disclose students’ gender identities to their parents or guardians, regardless of the students’ consent.
LGBT+ advocates decry these as “forced outing” policies, arguing they prevent kids from determining how and when they come out to their parents, thus “[putting] them at risk of violence or homelessness.” AB 1955 was crafted by assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego) to explicitly outlaw such policies, which he said “violate the trust and safety of the students in their classrooms.”
Ward is the vice chair of the powerful LGBTQ Caucus in the California legislature, which positioned AB 1955 as their number one priority bill and framed it in terms of “protecting LGBTQ+ students from forced outings and supporting families in working on family acceptance on their own terms.” The bill’s official name, the SAFETY Act (Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth), positions the bill as being about safety for LGBT+ young people.
But “safety” in what sense?
Kids Safer with Activists Than with Parents?
I’m a California resident and a parent of three young children. Part of what’s so disturbing to me about laws like AB 1955 is the assumption the state is the “safer place” and more trustworthy protector of children than their own families. Are politicians and public educators really better positioned than parents to walk with kids through massive, theologically loaded questions about gender and sexuality?
I ascribe to the principle of subsidiarity, which conceives the nuclear family as the foundation of society and construes local, state, and national governments as helpful to the extent they support the family rather than undermine its authority or sideline it. As one writer put it, “Under subsidiarity, government is by no means prohibited from providing aid; it is simply kept in its lane.”
When the state undermines parental authority and seeks to facilitate secret-keeping between children and their parents, as in AB 1955, it’s not staying in its lane. Public schools shouldn’t be places where parents fear that their children will be “lost” to values and visions at odds with how they’ve raised their kids. But sadly, these fears are increasingly warranted.
Are politicians and public educators really better positioned than parents to walk with kids through massive, theologically loaded questions about gender and sexuality?
My wife and I are fortunate enough to be able to send our kids to a theologically orthodox, private Christian school. But in a state that’s by far the most expensive in the nation to live in, relatively few families can afford this option. I worry for Christian parents here who have no option other than sending their kids to public schools where, thanks to laws like AB 1955, they’re at risk of being kept in the dark about some of the most important developments in their children’s lives.
Assemblymember Bill Essayli (R-Riverside) was one of the most outspoken opponents of AB 1955. After Newsom signed it into law, Essayli said the move “defied parents’ constitutional and God-given right to raise their children,” adding that the law “codifies the government’s authority to keep secrets from parents” and “endangers children by excluding parents from important matters impacting their child’s health and welfare at school.” Jonathan Keller, president of the California Family Council, agreed, calling the signing of AB 1955 “a direct assault on the safety of children and the rights of their parents.”
Unsafe Practice of Parent-Exclusionary ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care
Not all public schools in California are equally activist-oriented on LGBT+ issues and “gender-affirming” care. And many public school teachers are faithful Christians who are required to enforce policies they didn’t have a part in creating. But many other school administrators and teachers do promote progressive gender ideology and actively seek to subvert parents and conservative communities on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Books like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage have chronicled the extent to which “gender affirmation” policies are widespread in public schools and deliberately subvert parental authority.
As one parent told The Gospel Coalition in a harrowing account of her teen daughter’s decision to identify as a boy, the progressive public school was a major accelerant of her daughter’s gender transition. Her daughter was invited (possibly recruited) to the school’s Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club and, at every step in her gender identification transition, was “applauded and congratulated” at school. The mother finally realized she “cannot protect [her] child at school” and opted to escape the cult and homeschool her daughter instead.
Not only are young people applauded and encouraged to experiment with sexuality and gender identity in public schools, but they’re also often referred by those schools to gender-affirming therapists and local LGBT+ centers offering youth programs as “safe spaces,” all without informing the people most invested in the children’s ultimate safety and flourishing: their parents.
These “safe spaces,” however, are anything but safe. It’s not safe for vulnerable adolescents to have their mental confusion affirmed at every step but never questioned. It’s not safe for teenagers to make potentially life-altering, body-mutilating decisions without patiently processing it with their parents.
These ‘safe spaces’ are anything but safe. It’s not safe for vulnerable adolescents to have their mental confusion affirmed at every step.
The U.K.’s recently released Cass Report reinforces what parents already know: it’s not advisable for immature children to medically alter their bodies based on perceived senses of gender dysmorphia. Parents aren’t crazy, cruel, or abusive when they object to their child desiring to change his or her gender identity. Their intuitions to put the brakes on their child’s desire for rapid transformation are correct and loving. What’s cruel is an education system that won’t let parents step in to impose those loving brakes.
How Should Christian Parents Respond?
Christian parents nationwide should be concerned about this law, because what starts in California often gets replicated eventually in other states. If you care about parental rights and want to make sure public schools can’t withhold vital information from you about your children, get involved by reaching out to your local school board or other elected officials to advocate for parental notification policies and other protections against LGBT+ ideology propagated in schools.
While conservative social issues have been recently abandoned on national party platforms, change can still happen on the state level if we care enough to get informed and involved, electing state representatives (and school board members) who will advocate against harmful gender ideology in schools and parental secrecy policies like AB 1955.
But as Joe Carter has pointed out, policies and legislative actions to protect parental rights aren’t enough, and indeed might come too late for some families. Parents should be diligent in monitoring the influences shaping our children, which includes schools but also friend groups, online behavior and social networks, agenda-driven entertainment, and more. Parents should develop thick community (through church ideally, and a local web of trusted families) that provides a network of loving accountability, so that even if your child is doing something at school you don’t know about, there are dozens of other trusted, loving eyes on them in all kinds of other spaces.
We must also be proactive in helping our kids form healthy, biblical understandings of human anthropology, including age-appropriate conversations about gender and transgender ideology. We should encourage our churches and youth groups to lean into these topics and help students learn—and learn to love—what Scripture and Christian tradition say about gender and sexuality.
What happens if we don’t have these conversations first and lay foundations of Christian wisdom in our children? Online influencers, activists, and educators will be more than happy to fill that formational void—seeking not only to compete with your parental authority and influence but even to replace it altogether.