California Parents Are Fighting Back

and it matters everywhere

California government has descended into destructive cruelty, fully committing to the sexualization of childhood in a culture of official secrecy, and they’ve left most Californians behind. Real backlash is coming, but there are obstacles on the path that leads back to sanity.

Also: Every bad idea that starts on the Left Coast rolls east. It’s the laboratory for social ruin. However little you care about California, and however much it irritates you to hear about it, it’s your future — or, more to the point, the future of your children and grandchildren. So wherever you are, take a few minutes to think about the fight that’s brewing here. It’s coming your way.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing a school district to force it to keep sexual secrets from parents, and he keeps issuing legal advisories against “forced outing policies” in K-12 schools.

“Forced outing policies”: plainly and honestly telling parents what sexual identities their own children declare to school officials, including instances in which children tell teachers they want to adopt a new name and pronouns to fit a declared gender that doesn’t match their bodies. Our state government is fighting to turn schools into sexualized zones of secrecy, separating parents and children. Mommy and daddy don’t need to know about the sexy things we discuss in second grade, kids. Sshhh, it’s our special secret.

See how wonderfully progressive that is? Children have to hide who they are and what they do from their parents, but they should have an entirely candid and intimate relationship with officials in government-run schools.

Remember, too, that California officials are very proud of the way 12 year-olds can get all the abortions, STD meds, and birth control that they need to be sexually autonomous — without mommy and daddy finding out, because parents can be such downers about 12 year-olds getting chlamydia from their older special friends.

But this is also happening, and I was in the Southern California church gymnasium where this event took place this weekend:

California is building some remarkable bridges around the effort to prevent the sexualization of childhood and the exclusion of family from sexualized school discussions. Over the course of a few hours this weekend, I heard animated conversations among evangelicals about the demonic influence behind the homosexual agenda, and I heard equally passionate discussion about the importance of groups like Gays Against Groomers and the Women’s Liberation Front in the fight to protect children. People who are not at all inclined to view each other as friends are nonetheless becoming practical allies across heavily drawn ideological lines. People on the left mostly agree with people on the right about the parent-child relationship and the proper role of public schools. California government is all-in on sexy secret childhood, while Californians are mostly appalled:

A deep-blue state is splitting from an ideologically insane government in one important place, pulling together a genuine and possibly enduring left-right coalition. This is a cause for hope, but its success isn’t a given.

In the next three months, a statewide nonprofit organization called Protect Kids California will succeed or fail at an effort to gather 550,000 valid signatures from registered voters to place a measure on the November ballot that will do three things:

• Requires schools to notify parents regarding children's mental health concerns identified in school settings, including gender identification issues.

• Protects girls competitive sports and school spaces to be for biological girls only.

• Prevents the sterilization of children by prohibiting the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, mastectomies and genital surgeries for minors.

The organizers of the ballot measure called it an initiative to protect children, but state law requires the attorney general — precisely the one executive branch official who’s most adamant about sexualizing childhood — to analyze proposed ballot measures and give them a descriptive title. To the delight of the news media, Bonta has formally described the measure as an initiative to restrict the rights of transgender children.

I spoke this weekend with Erin Friday, one of the organizers of Protect Kids California, and she’s worried. They’ve been relying on volunteers to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures, but professional signature-gatherers offer the usual path to success for statewide ballot measures. A professionalized, well-organized campaign to make the November ballot will cost $6 million to $8 million, she estimates — including funding for legal efforts against state interference — but deep-pocketed potential backers have so far mostly been slow to support the effort. No one wants to go first, she says, and “they want a guarantee of success” before they write a big check. Conservative legal advocacy groups, law firms, and donors “go for the low-hanging fruit,” focusing on red states where they know they can win, but they neglect the ways that California is a harbinger and a social laboratory.

“They want to just abandon California,” she says. “You can't.” Nationwide, failure here “is going to embolden the other side.”

The tide turns, Friday says, when people see that the sexualization of childhood is a question that cuts across ideological boundaries — a reality that organizers are seeing firsthand. “We had very left, pro-abortion women collecting signatures at Walk for Life,” she says. “Successfully. Very successfully....This should scare the Democratic Party. Or wake them up."

Connecting the already-fully-committed political right to the increasingly committed political left, Friday argues that trans ideology relies on ironically rigid gender norms. Parents of trans children say that that knew their boys were born in the wrong body because they liked pink and played with dolls; gay and lesbian teenagers are increasingly encouraged to attack their own bodies. You don’t want to wear dresses, so you were born with the wrong genitals and you must really be a boy. You need surgery to make you who you really are.

"This is a self-created self-loathing of the body,” she says. “And it's actually a very homophobic movement....We're transing the gay away. There are no tomboys anymore, or butch lesbians. It's a misogynistic movement."

It’s also an industry, an outpost of the “medical-industrial complex,” having grown to over 200 pediatric gender clinics nationwide. Gender affirmation is a business, cutting and drugging healthy young bodies for profit.

"This is not a movement of kindness,” Friday says. “It's a movement of destruction."

Californians are trying to stop that movement of destruction, but — in an effort to defeat their own ideologically deranged government — they need help. You can donate to Protect Kids California here, and Californians can sign up to volunteer for the project here.

The destructive sexualization of children’s bodies, and the culture of secrecy around that sexualization, won’t just stop. It has to be stopped.