California judge puts school district’s policy of outing transgender students to parents on hold
A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge has put a pause on Chino Valley Unified School District’s new policy requiring school employees to out transgender students to their parents.
Wednesday’s temporary restraining order marks the first legal setback for an effort to implement forced outing policies in school districts across the state. The latest to consider such a policy is Rocklin Unified. Other school systems that have passed or considered such a policy include districts in Murrieta and Temecula.
The policy requires teachers and other school staff to notify parents if a student requests to go by a different name or pronouns, or joins a school program or uses a bathroom designated for a sex other than what appears on the student’s birth certificate.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who filed a legal challenge against the Chino Valley policy, after sending a letter warning the district that its actions were illegal and launching a civil rights investigation into the summer decision, hailed Judge Tom Garza’s decision in a statement Wednesday.
“San Bernardino Superior Court’s decision to issue a temporary restraining order rightfully upholds the state rights of our LGBTQ+ student community and protects kids from harm by immediately halting the board’s forced outing policy,” Bonta said. “While this fight is far from over, today’s ruling takes a significant step towards ensuring the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of transgender and gender-nonconforming students.”
In a filing seeking the temporary restraining order, the attorney general’s office argued that the school district’s outing policy “expressly single(s) out transgender and gender nonconforming students for different, adverse treatment from their cisgender peers.”
Cisgender refers to someone who identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth.
The judge’s order was dismissed as “the opinion of one state court judge,” by Riverside Republican Assemblyman Bill Essayli, an outspoken supporter of such policies who introduced a bill to make them state law earlier this year. That bill died without a hearing.
Essayli said that this matter will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, and in the meantime he encourages other California school districts “to continue their deliberative process and to not be deterred by the Attorney General’s intimidation tactics we saw displayed in court today.”
