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A Republican California lawmaker made a series of false statements Wednesday in response to a Democratic bill that would prevent school districts from forcing school staff to inform parents that their child is transgender.
Assemblyman Bill Essayli, R-Corona, made the statements on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Let’s be clear. There is no forced outing policy in California. This is a false narrative crafted to take advantage of people’s emotions,” Essayli wrote in the lengthy post.
Essayli has often objected to describing the practice of forcibly revealing a student’s gender to parents against their will as “forced outing,” although that is in fact what districts across California have been doing since the first such policy was introduced last summer.
School districts from Chino Valley to Rocklin have adopted policies requiring teachers to notify parents if their child uses different pronouns or a different name at school, regardless of whether that notification would put the child at risk for abuse.
This leads to Essayli’s second untruth.
“There is no evidence that parents reject children who experience gender dysphoria,” Essayli wrote, referring to the medical diagnosis for the psychological problems resulting from the conflict between sex assigned at birth and gender identity.
This is incorrect.
An August 2021 study published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that transgender and gender-nonconforming adolescents are more likely to experience physical, psychological and sexual abuse than their gender-nonconforming peers.
A 2022 survey from LGBTQ advocacy group Trevor Project found that less than a third of trans and non-binary youth consider their home a safe and affirming place.
About a third of LGBTQ youth experience rejection from their parents, according to a 2015 study cited by the Trevor Project. Another 2019 study found that about half of all transgender and gender non-conforming youth “continued to experience minority stress as a result of their parents’ rejection.”
A 2009 study of transgender women of color found that many reported being forced or choosing to leave their homes as adolescents, increasing their risk of homelessness and poverty. Another study found that the likelihood of suicide attempts and drug and alcohol abuse increased significantly with family rejection.
There is also anecdotal evidence.
When the Rocklin Unified School District considered implementing a parental notification policy last fall, a number of LGBTQ people wrote about their own tumultuous home lives, and the danger such a policy would have put them in had it been in effect when they came to school. at school.
One person wrote about when they were 14 and “still very confused” about their gender identity. The person said it was “not safe or reasonable” for them to talk to their parents because they were “subject to all kinds of abuse at home.”
Another person wrote that they knew at least two people who had committed suicide “for fear of being left out” at home.
Essayli also claimed in his post that “courts have ruled against state efforts to block these common sense parental notification policies. A federal judge ruled that parents have a constitutional right to be informed, and teachers have a constitutional right not to keep secrets from parents.”
While it’s true that a federal judge has sided with two San Diego-area educators who filed a lawsuit alleging they have a First Amendment right to inform parents about their transgender children, the response in state courts has been considerably more mixed .
Finally, Essayli repeated the falsehood that most transgender youth will “grow out of it naturally after they go through puberty.”
Again, this is incorrect.
Although previous decades-old studies have shown that the majority of children no longer identify as transgender, these studies include children who would not identify as transgender today.
“The methodology of these studies is deeply flawed because they do not study gender identity,” Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health services at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic, told KQED in 2018.
Ehrensaft told KQED that a “vast majority” of those listed as no longer identifying as transgender were actually gay boys “whose parents were angry because they were boys wearing dresses. They were brought to the clinics because they did not conform to gender norms.”
A 2022 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that at the end of a five-year period, 94% of trans youth persisted in their transgender identity.
“These results suggest that retransitions are not common. It is more common for transgender youth who went through a social transition at a young age to continue to identify in this way,” the study shows.
Another study, from 2021, found that 86.9% of people who “socially transitioned,” meaning they started using a different name, pronouns, and dressing to match gender identity, continued to do so .
Essayli’s office did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment or a request to provide the sources of his claims by deadline.
Jenavieve Hatch contributed to this report.
