Fact check: California lawmaker statements about parents of transgender children are wrong

Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com.

A California Republican lawmaker made a series of false statements Wednesday, in response to a Democratic bill that would stop school districts from forcing school staff to inform parents that their child is transgender.

Assemblyman Bill Essayli, R-Corona, made the statements on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Let’s be clear. There are no ‘forced outing’ policies in California. This is a false narrative manufactured to prey on people’s emotions,” Essayli wrote in the lengthy post.

Essayli has frequently taken exception to describing the practice of forcibly revealing a student’s gender to their parents against their will as “forced outing,” though that is in fact what districts across California have been doing since the first such policy was enacted last summer.

School districts from Chino Valley to Rocklin have passed policies requiring teachers to notify parents if their child uses different pronouns or a different name at school, regardless of whether that notification would place the child in danger of abuse.

Which leads to Essayli’s second falsehood.

“There is no evidence that parents are rejecting children who are experiencing gender dysphoria,” Essayli wrote, referring to the medical diagnosis for the psychological distress resulting from the conflict between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.

This is incorrect.

An August 2021 study published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that transgender and gender-non-conforming adolescents are more likely to experience physical, psychological and sexual abuse than their gender-conforming peers.

A 2022 survey by LGBTQ advocacy group the Trevor Project found that less than a third of trans and nonbinary youths view their home as a safe and affirming place.

About a third of LGBTQ youths experience parental rejection, according to a 2015 study cited by the Trevor Project. Another study in 2019 found that approximately half of all transgender and gender-non-conforming youths “continued to experience minority stress related to parent rejection.”

A 2009 study that looked at transgender women of color found that many reported being forced out of their homes as adolescents or choosing to leave, increasing their risk of homelessness and poverty. Another study found that the odds of suicide attempts and drug and alcohol abuse increased significantly with family rejection.

There’s also anecdotal evidence.

When the Rocklin Unified School District was considering implementing a parental notification policy last fall, a number of LGBTQ people wrote in to describe their own tumultuous home lives, and the danger such a policy would have placed them in had it been in place when they were in school.

One person wrote about when they were 14 and “still very confused” about their gender identity. The person said it was “not safe or reasonable” for them to talk to their parents, as they were “subject to abuse of many types at home.”

Another person wrote that they knew at least two people who had completed suicide “citing fear of being outed” at home.

Essayli also claimed in his post that “courts have ruled against the state’s efforts to block this common sense parental notification policy. A federal judge ruled that parents have a constitutional right to be informed, and teachers have a constitutional right to not keep secrets from parents.”

While it’s true that a federal judge has sided with two San Diego-area educators who sued alleging they have a First Amendment right to inform parents about their trans children, in the state courts the response has been considerably more mixed.

Finally, Essayli repeated the falsehood that most transgender youths “will outgrow it naturally after going through puberty.”

Again, this is incorrect.

While previous, decades-old studies have shown a majority of children do cease identifying as transgender, those studies included in their sample children who today would not be identified as transgender.

“The methodology of those studies is very flawed, because they didn’t study gender identity,” Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic, told KQED in 2018.

Ehrensaft told KQED that a “good majority” of those who were listed as no longer identifying as transgender were actually gay boys “whose parents were upset because they were boys wearing dresses. They were brought to the clinics because they weren’t fitting gender norms.”

A 2022 study appearing in the journal Pediatrics found that at the end of a five-year period, 94% of trans youths persisted in their transgender identity.

“These results suggest that retransitions are infrequent. More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way,” the study found.

Another study, from 2021, found that 86.9% of people who “socially transitioned,” meaning they started going by a different name and pronouns and dressing to match the gender identity, persisted in doing so.

Essayli’s office did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment or a request to provide the sources of his claims by deadline.

Jenavieve Hatch contributed to this report.