The California state Senate is holding a hearing Tuesday on a proposed amendment that would classify parents who do not endorse their child’s gender confusion as abusive and, if passed, it could result in a child’s removal from their family’s home.
AB 957 already requires courts to consider whether parents are affirming their child’s gender in custody battles, but a proposed amendment “would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child.”
The new amendment alters California Family Code and would allow courts to step in if a family disapproves of transgender ideology.
“This means that parents in custody fights will have a material incentive to support affirmation as a means of gaining custody and judges will have to give priority to that issue when weighing and balancing the social factors that always are part of such cases,” writes Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.
Democratic Assemblymember Lori Wilson, who has a transgender son, and state Senator Scott Wiener wrote the proposed amendment after it passed California’s State Assembly on May 3.
The revisions must be approved before the bill becomes law.
“This particular bill adds the very important factor that affirming a child’s gender identity is in their best interest,” Wilson explained.
The change qualifies “gender affirmation” as a standard of care in California making schools, churches, and other organizations open to repercussions for failing to recognize a child’s gender identity as well.
The amendment does not clarify what not affirming a child’s gender means.
“While the updated language does not define what affirmation means, it tells judges to consider anything less by parents on par with the parents’ history of drug and alcohol use, physical abuse, or neglect of a child,” Susannah Luthi of The Washington Free Beacon writes.
She continued, “The bill makes no distinctions regarding the age of a child, how long a child has identified as transgender, or affirmation of social transition versus medical sex-change treatments.”
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Jay Richards, the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, calls AB 957 a “grotesque violation” of parents’ rights.
“While more and more European countries pound the breaks on ghoulish gender medicine for kids, California has decided to mandate it,” he wrote.
Richards continued, “They not only want to make sure that any child with discordant feelings toward his or her sexed body gets fast-tracked to cross-sex hormones and sterilizing surgery, state Democrats want to go after parents who might otherwise hesitate. This is a grotesque violation of both children’s and parent’s rights.”
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