POLITICS: Newsom calls good parenting ‘policing’

The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled, for the first time, that parents have a constitutional right to know when a school is facilitating their child’s gender transition. 

Three years ago, Governor Gavin Newsom called policies providing parental notification an “assault on the trans community.” Now, according to The California Post, he has responded to the Supreme Court decision by claiming that teachers will be “forced to be gender cops.”

I have spent three years as Special Counsel at Thomas More Society litigating Mirabelli v. Bonta all the way to the highest court in the land. The governor’s response tells you everything about why this case had to go all the way. 

In the most absurd, circular definition imaginable, California defined gender identity to mean an “individual’s stated gender identity, … without regard to any contrary statement by any other person, including a family member.”

Thus, under policies and legal directives enforced by the State of California under Newsom’s watch, California teachers were required to “unhesitatingly accept” a student’s assertion of his or her gender identity, and only disclose the gender identity to the parents if the student consented. 

Teachers throughout the State of California were being ordered to deceive parents about the most fundamental aspects of their children: their gender identity at school.  

California’s own experts acknowledged, as they must, that it’s not in a child’s best interest to have an identity at school that differs from their identity at home. 

In fact, it doesn’t take an expert to know that children do best when their parents are informed about their struggles and concerns, and can provide them with the guidance and help they need. 

The governor chooses to call parental involvement “policing.” Most people just call that “parenting.”

The governor also claimed the ruling “undermines student privacy.” He’s certainly staying on message: The Newsom administration took the concept of “student privacy” and turned it into a legal framework for keeping parents out.

Training materials, model policies, and attorney general guidance were all built around one premise: that a child’s “privacy” means the state decides what parents get to know. 

Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that premise entirely. 

The Court found that California had “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

What the governor calls privacy, the Court called a violation of constitutional rights.

And the record in our case shows one tragic example (out of many) of what his version of privacy actually produced: A child who ended up in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, because no one at her school told her parents she was presenting as a different gender during school hours. 

They went along with it and kept it quiet, as the Newsom administration’s policies dictated.  

The governor also invoked “the ability to learn in a safe and supportive classroom, free from discrimination.”

Safe for whom? After 26 depositions, it was abundantly clear that these policies were not designed to keep children safe, but to keep parents out.  

While Governor Newsom may try to argue against the Supreme Court’s ruling with political talking points, we’re dealing with a constitutional holding from the nation’s highest court.

A 6–3 majority found that his administration’s policies likely violate both the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Even Justices Kagan and Jackson, in dissent, conceded the policies “could have crossed the constitutional line.” 

More than a thousand school districts across the country maintain similar parental exclusion policies. Every one of them is likely watching to see what California does next.

The governor has a choice: He can accept that the era of state-enforced secrecy between schools and families is over and bring California into compliance. Or he can keep fighting a battle that six Supreme Court justices have already told him he is likely to lose. 

Over the past three years, my colleagues and I have incurred nearly $4.2 million in legal fees and litigation costs battling California. With the Supreme Court’s ruling, the State of California will have to pay for the cost of beating back its own unconstitutional policies. 

For the taxpayers’ sake, it is time for California to close out its account. 

Paul M. Jonna is Special Counsel at Thomas More Society and Partner at LiMandri and Jonna LLP.