California isn’t a state one normally associates with transphobia, but of course, in 2023, hatred knows no borders. California Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R-of course-Riverside), has sponsored AB 1314, a bill which, among other things, “would require school districts to notify parents in writing within three days after learning a student is identifying as a gender that doesn’t align with official records or their birth certificate”.
State-mandated outing of children can obviously be harmful, potentially putting the child at risk for any amount of family abuse, but of course, as is par for the course with the right-wing agenda, any actual child’s well-being is secondary to bigoted anachronism. Equality California’s Executive Director Tony Hoang put it accurately:
“AB 1314 ignores the reality…Trans people are more likely to face family rejection and even abuse at home based on their gender identity, which leads to overrepresentation in foster care, juvenile detention, and among unhoused youth.”
Tony Hoang, Equality California
Florida’s legislature currently has no less than 18 bills circulating through its halls, seeking to regulate everything from where trans people pee to when, and if, they have access to gender-affirming health care. One particularly dystopian bill “would give judges the power to change a custody agreement if parents disagree on whether to support their transgender child.”
This lie that homophobia is good parenting — that the home of a hatemongering homophobe is the best environment for a gay child — is an insidious myth that needs to be expunged from the American psyche. No other abuser of their children has such a choir upholding their right to abuse. A queer child coming out at school is almost certainly doing so because doing so at home is not an option — to then turn that child over into the hands of the bullies that birthed them is inhumane and deserving of criminalization. No department of “human services” or “child protection” that would do such a thing is worthy of its name.
Given the harm that we know will be inflicted by homophobic parents after having their child outed to them, shall school systems then be held liable for putting children in danger? Which corpse will serve as the “outcry” in the 2030s – which child abuse fatality – that this was a bad idea from the beginning? Has the bar for parenting fallen so low that even a bigot is immune from being rightfully declared “unfit”?
Vote like your family depends on it.
