California has increasingly become the national model for implementing progressive policies that waste money, weaken the economy , and splinter the family. A new law is the latest in the list of examples of California’s leftward drift. It created controversy in the legislature, has already spurred lawsuits, and has been blamed for Elon Musk ’s decision to desert the state.
In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed Assembly Bill 1955 into law.
The Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act, or SAFETY Act, prohibits school districts from having policies that require parents to be notified if their child “changes” his or her gender or identifies as transgender . The law states that school employees “shall not be required 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.”
The bill was passed, according to proponents, as a way to keep LGBT children safe. California is the first state to adopt such legislation.
“Politically motivated attacks on the rights, safety, and dignity of transgender, nonbinary, and other LGBTQ+ youth are on the rise nationwide, including in California,” said the bill’s author , Assemblyman Chris Ward, a San Diego Democrat. “While some school districts have adopted policies to forcibly out students, the SAFETY Act ensures that discussions about gender identity remain a private matter within the family.”
Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a Riverside Republican, opposed the bill. On X, Essayli said the bill was “immoral and unconstitutional.”
“Today, Governor Gavin Newsom defied parents' constitutional and God-given right to raise their children by signing #AB1955 which codifies the government's authority to keep secrets from parents,” he wrote. “ #AB1955 endangers children by excluding parents from important matters impacting their child's health and welfare at school.”
The bill will automatically upend the parental notification policies that many school boards had enacted in districts across California last year, including the Chino Valley Unified School District in Riverside, the first district to implement this kind of policy; Rocklin Unified School District; and Dry Creek Joint Elementary School District .
The state of California even rejected these parental notification policies when local districts implemented them. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office told school boards that these policies violated state law. “By singling out transgender and gender nonconforming students for different, adverse treatment that puts them at risk of harm, forced disclosure policies violate their constitutional right to equal protection and privacy, as well as their statutory protection from discrimination under California law,” the January 2024 alert said .
Reaction is mixed
There was significant debate leading up to the passage of the bill, but the controversy didn’t end once it was signed into law.
Elon Musk announced the relocation of SpaceX and X headquarters from California to Texas as a direct result of mounting progressive policies that have dissuaded him from continuing to do business in the state. He cited this new law as the “final straw.” In a follow-up post , Musk said, “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.”
Of course, conservative organizations across California, outliers attempting to advocate for the state’s remaining non-leftists, have expressed their opposition. “We are disappointed to see Gov. Gavin Newsom sign Assembly Bill 1955, legislation that unconstitutionally abrogates parental rights,” said Lance Christensen , vice president of education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center. “Public schools are meant to support, not subvert, parents in their efforts to educate their children.”
In the California Policy Center’s statement on the bill, Christensen warned that it also violates the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, “which grants parents universal access to information about their child in their public school. Districts that create dummy files to ‘support’ a new gender identity for kids stand to lose federal funding.”
The Liberty Justice Center, a conservative legal group, has already sued California on behalf of the Chino Valley Unified School District and several of the district’s parents, claiming that the law infringes on the rights of parents .
Similar policies thwarted elsewhere
While California is the first state to pass a law like this, some school districts have passed policies encouraging teachers and administrators to keep information about gender affirmation or LGBT interests between children and themselves private. They have not fared well when parents eventually discovered these policies.
Last year, a federal court in Wisconsin ruled a school district that had been affirming a student's gender transition against parents’ wishes had violated parents' constitutional rights. “The current policy of handling these issues on a case-by-case basis without either notifying the parents or by disregarding the parents wishes is not permissible and violates fundamental parental rights,” the ruling said.
All children deserve to feel safe at home and at school. It’s nevertheless hard to see how a bill like this does not also have the effect of undermining parental rights. The legislation instructs school officials and teachers to hide the fact that a child may be gender-confused or adopting a new name or pronoun or identity at school.
Keeping this information from parents, as a way to protect a student, will actually alienate gender-confused children from their parents more, at a time in their lives when they need the support of their family most. Even the most traditional parents, who may not subscribe to the idea of letting their children take life-altering hormone blockers, would want to know if their child was struggling in this area and keeping it from them purposely while confiding in teachers or staff.
Opponents predict the bill will face challenges in court and that parental rights advocates will win. But it doesn’t undo the damage immediately, and it doesn’t negate the message this bill sends to parents across California. In passing this law, the state purposely wedges teachers and school staff between parents and students.
Texas Hold 'em
Meanwhile, in Texas , a different sort of battle over parental rights is playing out with a very different result.
In June, just weeks before Newsom signed his parental rights bill, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on the medical treatment of transgender minors. Several Texas families and medical organizations filed a lawsuit claiming that Texas’s ban, which went into effect Sept. 1, 2023, violates their right to seek specific medical care for their children. Texas is one of at least 25 states that have adopted similar laws protecting children from life-altering transgender-related care. A lower court had previously blocked the enforcement of Senate Bill 14.
Opponents of the bill and the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling framed the bill not just as harmful to transgender children but as a blow to parental rights.
“Instead of leaving medical decisions concerning minor children where they belong, with their parents and their doctors, the Court here has elected to let politicians — in blatant disregard for the overwhelming medical consensus — determine the allowed course of treatment, threatening the health and the very lives of Texas transgender youth,” said Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of constitutional law practice Lambda Legal.
In the 8-1 decision, the justices explained there are limits to parental rights. “In short, our precedents acknowledge that parental rights, though weighty, at times give way to other competing interests such as the interest in protecting children from harm. This is underscored by our Constitution’s express authorization of legislative regulation of the practice of medicine. Thus, to the extent parents possess a fundamental interest in obtaining medical care for their children, it has extended only to those medical treatments that are legally available.”
Texas lawmakers have considerable work to do on the public education system in Texas — they’re supposedly just one more legislative session away from finally passing universal education savings accounts — but they wouldn’t dream of passing a law that lets school employees keep students’ secrets from parents about anything, let alone health or medical issues.
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Musk isn’t the only one leaving California over its progressive ideas. California lawmakers’ insistence on passing laws that splinter the nuclear family, while increasing taxes, raising the minimum wage, and allowing crime to rise, is making the Golden State unappealing to many. Over 800,000 people moved out of California in 2022.
Texas’s firm grasp on more conservative policies, whether regarding state laws, parental rights, or transgender issues, coupled with no income tax and a booming economy could be another reason so many people are specifically leaving California and flooding the Lone Star State. Musk himself is one.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist for USA Today. She lives in Texas with her four children.
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