California parents have been granted a temporary reprieve: last week, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta blocked the enforcement of a California law which prohibits educators from sharing details about children’s gender identity with parents, until the case is concluded.
Prior to the ruling, California Attorney General Rob Bonta defended the state law, claiming that ‘the consequences of compelling the disclosure of confidential information about [students’] gender identity would be irreversible’.
Bonta’s unfortunate word choice ironically underscores the opposite — that California activists’ aggressive prioritisation of gender ideology is inflicting irreversible, permanent harm on innocent children. No wonder they want parents out of the equation.
Bonta has repeatedly exposed himself as a radical proponent of gender ideology, even for children. In an effort to block commonsense policy preventing the use of taxpayer funds for gender extremism, Bonta joined other attorneys general earlier this year in suing the Department of Health and Human Services. He has also championed opposition to parental notification laws while suing other states for laws that prevent biological males from using girls’ private spaces, such as bathrooms or locker rooms, in K–12 schools.
Bonta’s transparent prioritisation of ideology over common sense and the protection of innocent children is bad enough. Yet as the popularity of gender ideology – especially pertaining to children – wanes, Bonta is attempting to gaslight parents. He seems to want to scare them into submission by arguing that granting them knowledge of critical information regarding their beloved children will have irreversible consequences.
Since Bonta raised the word first, let’s talk about what is truly irreversible. The term has been used ad nauseam in recent weeks, especially after Fox Varian won the first medical malpractice lawsuit brought by a detransitioner in American history. Her case described how medical professionals took advantage of her youth and pressured both Varian and her parents into allowing a double mastectomy while she was still a minor, warning that she would commit suicide without the operation. In the name of avoiding ‘irreversible consequences’, they put a child under the knife.
Today, Varian lives with what is genuinely irreversible: scars where she might once have breastfed future children, and lifelong trauma besides. Her story is becoming far too common in a culture where activists like Bonta invoke the fear of ‘irreversible consequences’ to justify irreversible harm.
Just look at the case of Yaeli Martinez, a teenager from California who began questioning her sexuality after being bullied in middle school. School staff encouraged Yaeli to ‘clandestinely join the LGBTQ club’, where she was convinced by an older transgender student that Yaeli was depressed because she was actually a boy.
Around this time, Yaeli’s school adopted California policies prohibiting staff from telling parents about students’ gender identity. Yaeli’s mother said these policies made the school her ‘worst enemy’. Not only was Mrs Martinez excluded from key discussions about Yaeli’s mental health, but the school psychologist also told Yaeli to falsely accuse her mother of abuse as a way to override the parental consent requirement for Yaeli’s gender transition.
Mrs Martinez lost custody, was placed on a child abuse registry, and was given no say as strangers put Yaeli on cross-sex hormones instead of addressing the root causes of her depression. Even worse, activists ensured that Mrs Martinez could only see her daughter for one hour a week, during which time she was threatened not to speak about God.
Yaeli was eventually placed in an ‘independent living situation’ where ‘deep depression and poverty’ compelled her to ask her mother for food. During this time, she expressed regret at taking the cross-sex hormones. A gut-wrenching message from Yaeli to her mother exposed the youth of the tormented girl who had been taken advantage of: ‘Mom, I wanted to cry because no matter what you’re always there for me.’
Just months later, Mrs Martinez received the worst possible news any parent could hear: that her daughter had committed suicide by placing herself in front of a train, and that ‘her death was so gruesome that the funeral home was not able to show her body’.
This was Bonta’s policy in action. Bonta and the school counsellors who separated Yaeli and her mother did not have to clean Yaeli off the train tracks, much less explain to her mother how their ‘inclusive’ policies protecting Yaeli from ‘irreversible’ consequences had led to her death.
Yaeli’s story is one of the most damning indictments of transgender and parental notification policies I have ever heard. Tragically, she is not the only victim.
Yet people like Bonta will never say her name, much less acknowledge the irreversible damage these policies continue to inflict on innocent children across the country. They claim to know best, shut parents out, and leave families to bear the consequences.
The ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta cannot undo the damage already done, but it may at least force a reckoning with the policies that made it possible.
