Rep. Doug LaMalfa appears at school board meeting to spew transphobic nonsense | Opinion

Despite any number of pressing issues which might have occupied Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s time, the representative from California’s First District instead chose to attend a recent local school board meeting to loudly express his scientifically inaccurate views on gender and identity.

LaMalfa attended the board meeting not to display any opinion or support for the school’s lack of funds to build a permanent campus for their arts-focused high school, which was also on the agenda. Nor did he choose to comment on the fate of millions in bond funds at Chico Unified School District’s McManus Elementary, which also needed direction from the board that evening.

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Instead, LaMalfa chose to use one of his rare local appearances to speak against the rural school district and in favor of the plaintiff in a lawsuit, brought by the mother of an 11-year-old child who confided in their teacher a preference for a different gender identity while at school. The lawsuit’s complaint specifically calls out the district’s “Parental Secrecy Policy,” despite no policy existing under that name.

Meanwhile, there are genuine reasons to fear for the safety of this child, who is reported as “returning to identifying as a girl,” by their family to local media. Let’s hope the child is safe — but it’s hard to believe that’s possible in a home that clearly finds gender preference something to be exterminated and then exploited by the very adults who should love them unconditionally.

“Schools have really overstepped their bounds, overstepped their responsibilities when they’re doing this,” LaMalfa said at the meeting.

Their bounds and responsibilities to do what, exactly? To ensure safety and privacy for their students? To protect children from potentially dangerous home situations? To ensure that their schools are a safe place for kids to learn, play and trust?

It’s clear that the representative’s own schools understepped their responsibility to teach him the basics of science, which unequivocally states that biological sex is far more complicated than simply XX or XY chromosomes.

Instead of figuring out how to help schools in his area find funding, the politician recently introduced a bill in Congress that would withhold federal money from any school that fails to require parental permission before a student can change their name or pronouns.

Thankfully, that bill is likely to fail — like most of LaMalfa’s proposals. But it comes on the heels of more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that are up for consideration in various state legislatures, city councils and school boards across the country.

LaMalfa’s actions have ramifications that extend far beyond Chico and even Northern California. When California Assemblyman Bill Essayli, R-Norco, introduced Assembly Bill 1314, which would have had many of the same requirements as LaMalfa’s bill by forcing schools to out transgender students to their parents, Assembly Education Committee Chair Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, said Monday that he would hold the bill not only because it was “bad policy, but also because a hearing would potentially provide a forum for increasingly hateful rhetoric targeting LGBTQ youth.” The bill is effectively dead.

That’s the right step. California must continue to refuse and reject all forms of hate, especially when it rears up inside local, small governments. And, in doing so, we must hold people like LaMalfa to the consequences of their inflammatory and transphobic actions.

After all, LaMalfa also questioned the validity of the moon landing. “You know, I don’t have proof that men landed on the moon in 1969 because I wasn’t there,” the congressman said on CNN in 2020. Why should we be surprised that he questions the validity of gender identity?

Robin Epley is an opinion writer for The Sacramento Bee, with a focus on Sacramento County politics.