Families with schoolchildren should flee California

OPINION:

Last week, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 1955, which blocks schools from requiring faculty and staff to notify parents and legal guardians when their minor child attempts to change his or her “gender identity” from that of their born biological sex. Furthermore, under the law, school rules cannot require employees to disclose a student’s selected gender identity to their parents or any other person without the child’s authorization — even if the parents ask.

California is the first state in the country to pass such a law, preventing schools from requiring that parents have access to essential information about their sons or daughters. In June, however, according to the Washington Examiner, “New guidance from the New York State Education Department says school officials should keep parents in the dark about their child’s gender identity if the student does not consent to inform them.”

According to Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for Mr. Newsom, “This law helps keep children safe while protecting the critical role of parents.” He continued, “It protects the child-parent relationship by preventing politicians and school staff from inappropriately intervening in family matters and attempting to control if, when, and how families have deeply personal conversations.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. By not requiring school personnel to communicate critical information about children to their parents, the legal authority and responsibility of parents are seized by government employees. Keeping secrets from parents about their children is morally wrong, and there should be legal consequences for school districts and their employees who do so. Mr. Richards’ talking points are attempting to gaslight those who will listen and justify an all-out assault on the child-parent relationship.

It is mothers and fathers who know their children best and love them most. Mothers and fathers have been with their children since birth and will remain in their lives long past the school year. And mothers and fathers are ultimately responsible for the well-being of their children.

Parents are the most essential people in a child’s life and must know what is going on during the school day as it pertains to their children. Parental rights must be protected.

When parents live in states that grant them access to education freedom programs, their children aren’t trapped in schools that deceive them. With the passage of universal or near-universal school choice over the past three years in 12 states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia — families are being set free from government-run, teachers union-controlled public schools. More states are set to join them in the coming years. Texas is among the states poised to pass sweeping school choice measures in 2025.

Families are moving to states that are pro-freedom, including when it comes to their children’s education. But it is not just families that are opting to flee California, New York, Illinois and other states to escape the capture of their children’s hearts, minds and bodies. Companies are also starting to do so.

The day after Mr. Newsom signed the radical legislation into law, Elon Musk announced that his companies X and SpaceX would leave California and move to Texas. The timing was no coincidence. Mr. Musk posted on X: “This is the final straw. 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.”

Mr. Musk also posted, “I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”

Mr. Musk is far from the only one speaking up about this attack on parental rights, which includes the right and responsibility of parents to protect their children from harm.

As Michael Shellenberger explained on X: “The governor of America’s largest and richest state has just signed a law that puts 10 million children and adolescents in grave danger of medical mistreatment. The media headlines have it wrong. They claim that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s new law protects children by stopping public schools from outing their new gender to their parents. It does just the opposite. It makes children vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment.”

Schools must stop keeping secrets from parents about their children. Schools must also, as Mr. Shellenberger said, “stop teaching children, or allowing other people to teach children, the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing ideas that it’s possible to be born into the wrong body and possible to change one’s sex.”

Promoting these extremely harmful ideologies to minor children sets them on a path toward medical “transition” with irreversible, lifelong consequences. Furthermore, withholding a diagnosable psychiatric condition from parents is educational malpractice and should be illegal.

• Keri D. Ingraham is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, director of the American Center for Transforming Education and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.