California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a legal alert to districts across the state, warning them that requiring school staff to report if a student identifies as transgender violates the state’s constitution.

Tom Wait, CBS News

So begins a CBS News article written by Tom Wait, which popped up in my newsfeed this morning and led me to write this. The part of this that I want to focus on is this quote from the AG himself:

“We know what the data tells us — that 15% of transgender, gender non-conforming young people are kicked out of their home,”
“Another 10% are harmed physically by members of their direct family.”

CA Attorney General Rob Bonta, as reported by Tom Wait

I want to point out that nobody tries to contest this statistic, in fact it’s never mentioned again. Either it’s completely accepted by all parties or Wait didn’t bother to check it. And in Wait’s defense, this clearly isn’t an in-depth investigation, the article is notably light on details and I’ve probably spent more time on this blog post than Waits did on that.

I’m a poor researcher, but I have access to Google, and the results are pretty heartbreaking. Either Bonta was using outdated or California-specific data that I didn’t find in my quick & dirty search, or this is the lowest possible estimate, the cases that we definitely know about and can concretely demonstrate, and the real, harder-to-show number is much higher.

In a desperate attempt to stay on topic, I’m only going to link one of my search results. Here is the Trever Project’s 2022 research report on Homelessness and Housing Instability Among LGBTQ Youth. Here is a direct link to the PDF of the report. If you go to the Trevor Project’s website, you’ll notice that the first thing you get is a popup telling you that pressing the escape key three times quickly will get you away from the site, and they do that because a large part of what they do is provide support and counseling for LGBTQ young people, and for many of them simply looking up information on these issues could jeopardize their safety.

Let’s get back to the point. The controversy here is about school board policies that require school staff to report to parents about a student’s gender identity or pronoun preferences, and the specific policy being addressed within this article is from Chino Valley School District in southern California. It’s not entirely clear to me how they determine these identities and preferences, or how much time and effort they spend snooping into student’s personal lives instead of teaching them. I didn’t see an easy way to read the policy itself, though I may well have just missed it. Most of the reporting from last year used the phrase “asks to be identified” or “requests to identify” on the student’s part, so I suppose if a student simply asserts or demands such then there’s no need to report.

Something that I think needs more attention is that nobody seems to be claiming that there’s any real benefit to these policies. No, seriously, in everything I’ve read about them the only defense offered is that it’s a parent’s right to know, and it’s merely assumed that this somehow obviates the responsibility to protect children from abusive parents.

Getting back to the original CBS article, Chino Valley School Board President Sonja Shaw decided not to explain or defend the policy, but instead to attack the character of the AG.

“I think it’s clear that Bonta is showing his own insecurities,”
“He’s obsessed with power. He’s showing that he wants to be the parent of our children and he’s not doing his real job, which is keeping California safe. What is he doing to make them safe at campus by keeping parents out? It absolutely makes no sense.”

Sonja Shaw as quoted by Tom Wait

This is a fascinating quote, because it’s really obvious that Bonta is making kids safe by preventing you, Sonja Shaw, from telling people that have a 15% chance of making those kids homeless, and a 10% chance of physically abusing them intimate details that are none of your business.

Also, note the “power” mentioned here. Bonta isn’t assuming power for himself, or taking it away from parents. Hell, he’s just saying that the state constitution forbids tattletale policies like this under discrimination protections, and that he intends to enforce that constitution in his role as AG.
Also, let’s be real, these forced outing policies take power away from students and school staffmembers. You might argue that it’s not much and it’s power they only had in theory, sure, but it’s certainly not power that has anything to do with the attorney general or parents; it’s the student’s power to inform people of details of their personal life on their own terms, and the staff’s power to use their own discretion in sharing personal knowledge of their students.

Chino Valley Attorney Jacob Hiebert added that he doesn’t know the difference between “some” and “all”.

“What the attorney general has done here is to presume that all parents are abusers,”
“So, we need to keep this information from all of them and that makes no sense at all.”

Attorney Jacob Hiebert confusing “some” and “all”, as quoted by Tom Wait

Here’s the thing. A non-zero number of parents ARE abusers. A non-zero number of trans kids have parents who are abusers, and your policy intends to inform every single one of them of a new way to abuse their child.

What the attorney general has done is assume that 10% of parents would physically abuse their children is they learned that their kid was trans, and 15% would kick them out of the home. Again, my quick google suggested that those numbers are likely low-end estimates and it’s actually higher. (I suspect it’s much higher in Chino Valley, if the local school board is representative of the district.)

Unless you are prepared to argue that zero parents are abusers, you have to contend with how the abusers in your system are going to react to your policies. You have to figure out how likely your policies are to enable or provoke abuse, and you have to decide, ultimately, if the benefits of this policy outweigh that abuse. You have to make the terrible choice of how much child abuse your policy is worth. That is a hard damn choice, for sure. It’s not a decision anyone wants to make, but if you’re going to take your job seriously you have to do it.

More of my quick googling here. Chino Valley school district has 25,934 students. About 1.43% percent of children aged 13-17 are trans, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, so that’s about 371 trans students in Chino Valley. 15% of 371 is about 56.

Sonja Shaw and the rest of the Chino Valley School Board are saying that this “right to know” that parents have is worth making 56 of the children in their care homeless, and causing physical abuse of another 37. At least.

Simply put, I don’t believe it. I think the cruelty is the point. I think the purpose of this policy is to weaponize abusive parents, and the general anxiety teenagers often feel about sharing their personal life with their family, to keep trans kids in the closet. Apparently if that means enabling child abusers, that’s a price they’re willing to make kids they don’t know pay.

I don’t understand why keeping trans kids frightened and in hiding is such an important goal to so many people, but it seems like pointless cruelty to non-conformists is a popular hobby these days.

Let’s wrap this up.

Shaw believes that this is a fight for parents’ rights, and she isn’t giving up.

“The political cartel has continued to show their cards and I think we just need to stand with our constitutional rights and we need to make sure we protect our kids together,” she said.

Tom Wait, CBS News

We’re protecting kids from the abusive parents you’re working so hard to enable, Shaw. We’re protecting kids from you.