A public-school district in southern California sued Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday after he signed a bill into law preventing school districts from requiring that teachers and administrators inform parents of their child’s change in sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Chino Valley Unified School District, whose conservative school board has repeatedly stood up for parental rights, and eight parents argue the law violates the constitutional rights of parents as legal guardians.
“School officials do not have the right to keep secrets from parents, but parents do have a constitutional right to know what their minor children are doing at school,” Emily Rae, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. Rae serves as senior counsel at the Austin-based Liberty Justice Center, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the school district and parents.
Newsom enacted Assembly Bill 1955 on Monday, barring schools from adopting parental-notification policies. California is the first state to adopt such legislation. Unless the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California takes up the complaint, the law will go into effect unencumbered on January 1, 2025.
The plaintiffs warn parents will not be notified, the suit states, “when their children may be at increased risk of psychological, emotional, and physical harassment and abuse, and extremely high rates of suicide and suicide attempts,” which studies show that transgender and gender-nonconforming students may experience.
“A school district . . . shall not enact or enforce any policy, rule, or administrative regulation that would require an employee or a contractor to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent, unless otherwise required by state or federal law,” AB 1955 states.
“No matter how young a child is, a school cannot tell the child’s parents the school is socially transitioning their child without the minor’s ‘consent,'” the suit adds.
Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon disregarded these claims, calling the lawsuit “deeply unserious” and claimed the law “preserves the child-parent relationship.” He also maintained that parents still have rights in other respects when it comes to their children.
“California law ensures minors can’t legally change their name or gender without parental consent, and parents continue to have guaranteed and full access to their student’s educational records consistent with federal law,” Gardon said. “We’re confident the state will swiftly prevail in this case.”
The lawsuit lists the defendants as Newsom, California attorney general Rob Bonta, and California state superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond — all three of whom are Democrats.
The law also received pushback from billionaire Elon Musk, who revealed Tuesday that he will relocate his X and SpaceX headquarters in California to Texas. Musk called the gender-identity law “the final straw” for him.
“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,” he posted on X.
Musk added that he told Newsom a year ago that a law like this would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.” In 2021, Tesla moved its headquarters out of Palo Alto, Calif., to Austin, Texas.
The Chino Valley Unified School District passed a policy last year requiring that parents be notified if their child requests to change their gender identification or pronouns.
The move led to pushback from Bonta, who sued the district over the rule claiming students have a right to privacy. The policy was subsequently halted by a judge, and the public-school district later removed all mention of gender-identification changes from the rule. Instead, the updated policy more broadly required that schools notify parents when minors make any changes to their student records.
It remains to be seen whether other Democratic states follow California’s lead in prohibiting parental-notification policies related to gender identity. Meanwhile, a handful of Republican states have already moved to require that schools notify parents in that case. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee currently have such laws in place, while Arizona and Idaho have similar policies without specifying gender identity or sexuality.