On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill (AB) 1955 into law. The so-called “Safety Act” is the first in America that prevents schools from adopting any policy that would require teachers and staff to inform parents when their child wants to be referred to and treated as a member of the opposite sex or as “non-binary”.

Schools in the state were already performing secret social transitions of students in large part because of guidance from the California Department of Education that advises schools to hide this information from parents. AB 1955 is an attempt to codify these practices, empowering gender activists against their local critics.

California’s schools are going to extreme lengths to maintain this secrecy from parents. The Golden State’s Roseville Unified School District, for example, has a gender policy that assigns parents a score between 1-10 depending on how “supportive” they are predicted to be of their child’s transgender identity. A low score presumably means that the parents aren’t to be trusted with that sacred knowledge. And, of course, parents have no due process right to contest or even be made aware of the score they are assigned.

Governor Newsom has acknowledged that parents have a right to review student records, but he conveniently didn’t mention that he meant only the official records. Lawyers advising districts such as Roseville instruct schools to create separate, unofficial records for the students with “gender identities” to avoid parental detection — even when the parents employ their legal rights to obtain their student’s records.

Progressive activists frame secret gender transition policies as a simple matter of protecting student privacy and, by extension, safety against “abusive” parents. But the argument about privacy only makes sense if one subscribes to the dubious philosophical anthropology of the “transgender child”. That is, only if one assumes that some kids simply “are” trans, rather than seeing transition as a coping mechanism for underlying mental health issues, neurocognitive challenges, social adjustment problems, internalised homophobia, or identity confusion. AB 1955’s framing of these struggles, as a matter of “authentic” personal identity to be kept from parents in the name of privacy, is pointless or worse.

The Cass Review in the UK found an “absence of robust evidence of the benefits or harms of social transition for children and adolescents”, based on a systematic review of research in the area. The review also acknowledged that social transition may interfere with the natural resolution of gender dysphoria in children, and concluded that it should be thought of as an “active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning and longer-term outcomes”.

As if anticipating the new California law, the review emphasised the need for “clinical involvement in the decision-making process” when considering the social transition of children, adding that “this is not a role that can be taken by staff without appropriate clinical training.” Critically, “outcomes [of social transition] for children and adolescents are best if they are in a supportive relationship with their family. For this reason parents should be actively involved in decision-making unless there are strong grounds to believe that this may put the child or young person at risk.”

The last qualification about abuse is critical in US debates over social transition in schools. Al Muratsuchi, a state Democrat and supporter of AB 1955, asserted without qualification or evidence that parents who learn of their child’s gender identity struggles beat them.

But Democrats are trying to make the exception swallow the rule, and they’re doing so by redefining “abuse” to include not “affirming” a child’s “gender identity”. For AB 1955’s framers, parents who refuse to refer to their daughter as their son are akin to parents who would physically assault their children if they came home with a C in maths.

This is absurd, offensive, contrary to evidence and medical science, and a dangerous path for education policymakers to go down. If there are compelling indications that parents will be abusive in the true meaning of the word, states already have laws and schools have policies to deal with these unfortunate situations.

Progressive leaders in California have grossly underestimated the public’s opposition to secrecy in schools. According to Rasmussen Reports, only 12% of Californians oppose parental notifications. A SPRY poll conducted in the liberal strongholds of the Bay Area and Los Angeles by a feminist group found that 72% of Californians support policies requiring schools to notify parents if their child identifies as transgender in school.

There is, in short, a large and growing gap between Democratic lawmakers and blue-state voters on issues concerning youth and gender. On Tuesday, Elon Musk said that AB 1955 was “the final straw” in California’s repeated “attack[s]” on parental rights, and declared that “SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”

It is disturbing to see America’s supposed progressives turn their backs so forcefully on an emerging scientific consensus just because they lack the courage to stand up to powerful interest groups in their coalition. Perhaps a loss of tax revenue will persuade them.