Rob Bonta Eats Himself

a lawsuit that devastates its own argument by trying to make it

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is dangerously stupid, and he’s made an argument so bizarrely self-refuting — or self-annihilating? — that I’m still struggling to process how dumb it is. In a single short document, we have a picture of the way ideology and groupthink make people stupid. No: the way it makes them into monsters, but monsters who feel really sophisticated and virtuous. In this, Bonta isn’t individually important, but important as a representative of a ubiquitous social type.

I should have known last week. I made the mistake I warn against: I only read the news stories about Bonta’s “forced outing” lawsuit against Chino Valley Unified School District, and I more or less tuned out the details. I didn’t go look at the thing itself, unmediated, the single thing I always tell everyone to do. Bonta’s media framing has been really stupid, and I’ve commented on it, but an interview I just watched finally made me catch myself not paying attention. So I just downloaded the state’s opening brief, which the state provided with its press release, wanting to see with my own eyes the argument Bonta is actually making in court. Read the brief yourself if you don’t want to take my word for it, or at least read pg. 6:

Stamped Cvusd Complaint

516KB ∙ PDF file

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Remember that Chino Valley, like other California school districts that followed its lead, has implemented a policy requiring school officials to notify parents if a student announces that the gender they use at home differs from the gender they use at school. Yes, you can change your genders between venues, and welcome to California.

Bonta, like other state officials, calls Chino Valley’s notification requirement an assault on the privacy rights of students, and insists that school officials are bound by constitutional standards to hide information about student sexual identity and sexual behavior from parents. (State officials keep calling parent notification “unconstitutional,” though my copy of the Constitution seems to be missing the relevant clause.) Bonta has said and said and said that “transgender and gender nonconforming” students who are “outed” to their parents are endangered, so schools have a duty to avoid placing them in danger. Notice that premise: parents are very dangerous, so it’s important for school officials to keep secrets from them.

With all of that in mind, go look at the state’s brief. I mentioned pg. 6 — here’s part of it:

And here’s the big finish at the bottom of that same page:

So trans kids, that sacred category, live in a snake pit, they have much higher rates of mental health crisis than any other group of children, they’re bullied and demeaned and physically assaulted, they think about suicide all the time, and their parents shouldn’t know what they’re experiencing. Children who grind through lives of agony and misery should keep it a secret from the people who give them their homes, who gave birth to them, who gave them the genetic material that called their life into being. The family you live with shouldn’t know your unspeakably miserable true self. So you can be safe, see?

I read this brief in the back yard, and I shouted DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF? at my computer screen. Which may have confused the neighbors, but it’s not like it would be the first time. The answer is that they don’t hear themselves; they’re chanting the pieties of their social class, not thinking about the way any of it works in practice.

The best argument the State of California can muster is that children who are in near-suicidal daily pain should live honestly between 8:30 and 2:30, Monday through Friday, September to June, then live in secrecy and denial on the evenings and weekends and holidays, sneaking and hiding and seething with despair that they might be found out by the menacing presence that lurks up the hall in the master bedroom. Bonta is arguing in favor of this. It’s the thing he’s depicting as a healthy behavior that a judge should impose on schools by court order. Protect trans kids!

You could hardly harm children more if you just shot them.

Like the recent lawsuit filed in Florida to disqualify Donald Trump from the presidency — the one that was thrown out the week after it was filed — Bonta’s lawsuit signals clearly that it’s a political performance rather than a meaningful piece of litigation. In a noticeably thin argument, a few pages are devoted to a description of the “investigation” performed by the state. They all look like this:

This one guy, like, said, and then this other person said this other thing, and then, like, this other guy, he goes all like…

There are no affidavits, no transcripts, no citations for any of the investigative material. It’s literally campus gossip, thinly dressed up as legal argument, bearing no names, meeting no evidentiary standard of any kind. The Bonta interview I linked to above, the one that made me notice I hadn’t been paying attention? The interviewer asked the attorney general what case law he was relying on in court, and his answer was that, well, we’re relying on, uh, uh, uh, we’re, uh, you know, we’re using a lot of, um, like, laws and stuff, and and and, uh. I’m a shitty poker player, but I suddenly yearn to get my state’s attorney general to the table. This lawsuit isn’t intended to lead to a court order; it exists to get Rob Bonta on television.

To the extent that it works as designed, I expect that the interviews will work to reveal California’s top legal official as a uniquely shallow and empty figure, promoting monstrosities in a tone of piousness that, in context, lands as a profoundly sick expression of moral and intellectual madness. If you’re wondering why so many children are in such deep trouble, here it is, neatly typed up in a 23-page summary of what it looks like to completely abandon your ability to perceive reality.