Since the launch of his new podcast, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been reaffirming his willingness to break from the party line on at least some trans issues. In one episode this month, he highlighted the unfairness of biological males competing against females in sports. In 2023, he vetoed a law that would have elevated a parent’s willingness to “affirm” a child’s gender identity over other concerns in custody cases.

Last year, though, Newsom signed AB1955, the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth, or SAFETY Act. The bill, which went into effect on 1 January, restricts educational policies that require disclosure of “a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” to their own parents. “Studies confirm that LGBTQ+ youth thrive when they have parental support and feel safe sharing their full identities with them,” the bill reads, “but it can be harmful to force young people to share their full identities before they are ready.”

Institutional withholding of a child’s gender identity from parents has become a deeply contentious issue, and the subject of multiple lawsuits. Now, the Trump administration is testing Newsom’s supposed independence. On Thursday, the apparently not-yet-dismantled Department of Education launched an investigation into AB1955.

Trump’s team alleges that such policies violate the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, or FERPA. Often, supporters of what some call “parental preclusion policies” cite FERPA as proof that students have a right to privacy from their parents. Others, though, insist the point of FERPA is for adults to protect their children’s privacy from others. “Teachers and school counselors should not be in the business of advising minors entrusted to their care on consequential decisions about their sexual identity and mental health,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote in a statement. “That responsibility and privilege lies with a parent or trusted loved one.”

The problem is that many young people don’t trust their parents or loved ones when it comes to gender identity. As they learned that they each have an innate gender identity which might not match their body — and that it’s the body that must be changed — they also learned that parents who didn’t affirm that identity were “harming” them. Their unaffirming parents were “unsafe”.

Most likely, this is because the meanings of those words changed. Psychologist Nick Haslam’s 2016 paper “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology” details how definitions of words such as safety and harm expanded in the 2010s to include “less severe and debilitating” experiences — like being “misgendered” or “deadnamed”. Eventually, clinicians crept the concept of harm into the suggestion that withholding adolescent sex changes was a form of child abuse.

Yet social transition itself — changing one’s name, pronouns, or social category to live as the opposite or neither sex — is a contested intervention. The authors of a 2021 study noted: “claims that gender affirmation through transitioning socially is beneficial for children with [gender dysphoria] could not be supported.” What did matter was “individual social support provided by peers and family”.

The idea that parents who don’t affirm their children’s gender identities are harmful is a misinterpretation of the Family Acceptance Project’s research, which suggests a connection between rejecting behaviours on the part of parents and later mental health problems among the kids. Nowhere does it say that parents should be kept in the dark. Support and affirmation, however, are not synonymous. Support can mean assuring kids that even parents who disagree can love them.

Of course, school employees are mandated reporters; if there really is abuse, they must do something about it. But parents having different definitions of gender identity and different ideas about how to support their kids is not officially a reason to withhold personal information.

Trump’s investigation accuses California schools of “violating FERPA to socially transition children at school while hiding minors’ ‘gender identity’ from parents”. That is no doubt happening, and schools are stepping into murky territory when they essentially engage in a psychological intervention without parental knowledge or consent. Even Erica Anderson, a trans woman and psychologist who has treated hundreds of gender dysphoric young people, agrees that this is not the role of schools. In a brief about parental preclusion policies in another state, she wrote that “a transition is a major event in a youth’s life, and parents must be involved”.

The investigation insists that state laws don’t override federal laws — that AB1955 is not more powerful than FERPA. Likely, as with so much else Trump has attempted in regard to trans issues, we’ll only find out which has more staying power after it lands in court.

---

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

---