California Sues School District After Requiring Parent Notice of Pronoun Change

California’s attorney general is suing the Chino Valley Unified School District over the district’s policy on pronouns.

These policies would require teachers to notify parents if a student expresses a gender that is different from what is shown on school records. This comes as a huge loss to the trans community, as many school boards across the country have enacted similar policies to those of Chino Valley.

Attorney General Bob Ronta is suing the school district in an attempt to block this policy, stating that such policies would out transgender students and put their well being at risk.

In a world where our loved transgender folks are attacked at the hands of politics and fear, the only place that our trans youth can look to for safety and reassurance is in schools. Sadly, transphobia has found its way into the classroom, as more and more conservative school board members have been elected.

In California, more school districts have considered policies similar to those of Chino Valley, which have caused fierce debates at school board meetings. This is all amid the national conversations that have taken place about trans rights and the banings of gender-affirming care, trans athletes in schools, and the outing of trans kids to their parents.

A lot of these issues stem from hatred that exists in this world. Because such topics like these give a lot of support to conservatives, they feel the need to attack our community constantly while there are much bigger issues in the world.

The president of Chino Valley, Sonja Shaw, states that this lawsuit came to no surprise to her, as “officials have continued to shut parents out of children’s lives.” She continued to state that parents have a constitutional right in the upbringing of their children.

Unfortunately, in today’s society, a lot of ignorance like this exists among those who do not understand what it is like to be queer. Many of us are not able to just tell our parents our true identities because sometimes it is our biggest enemy.

“Parents are not uniformly accepting” says Jody Herman, a public policy scholar from the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.

Requiring parents to be notified if a student decides to change there pronouns would be dangerous to a trans student because some households have strong anti-queer beliefs. Such notice could alternate the lives of trans students if they live in a unsupportive or abusive household. Transgender students have a right to their expression in schools, and no one should interfere with that.