Supporters of a proposed California ballot initiative that would prohibit medical gender-transition procedures for kids and ensure that parents are informed if their child asks to socially transition in school are heading to court on Friday to challenge what they describe as a biased and illegal title for their measure that is hampering their ability to gather signatures.
Leaders of Protect Kids CA, the group advocating the initiative, are still hoping to get what they’re calling the “Protect Kids of California Act” on November’s ballot.
They say polling shows that Californians overwhelmingly support the issues addressed by their measure. But they contend that Attorney General Rob Bonta’s title — “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth” — violates the state’s election code, which requires the attorney general to provide proposed ballot initiatives with titles and summaries that are “true and impartial” and that are unlikely to “create prejudice for or against the proposed measure.”
Jonathan Zachreson, a member of the Protect Kids CA executive team, said Bonta, who is actively fighting court battles against other local parental-rights policies, is misusing his power to sabotage their grassroots campaign.
“When we’re out in the street, or just talking to neighbors, that is a common feedback that we get, ‘Why did you call it this? This is going to hurt it.’ I’m like, we didn’t have a choice,” Zachreson told National Review, adding that “we do have people that don’t want to sign” the petition because of the title Bonta assigned.
Bonta’s office told the Los Angeles Times that they “take this responsibility seriously and stand by our title and summary for this measure.”
In a hearing scheduled for Friday in Sacramento Superior Court, lawyers for Protect Kids CA will argue not only for a new title and summary for their initiative but for extra time to turn in enough petitions to get on November’s ballot, Zachreson said. To qualify for the ballot, they need about 550,000 signed petitions from registered California voters.
They’re not going to make a deadline this week to ensure that they make this year’s ballot but have another statutory deadline on May 28. If they make that deadline, it’s still possible they could be on the November ballot, but it could also get pushed to 2026, Zachreson said.
He estimated that they’ve collected about 200,000 signatures so far.
“If we turn our signatures in on May 28, there is nothing prohibiting all the local offices from just counting faster,” he said. “We anticipate that they’re not going to do that, they’re going to want to count slowly.”
Many of the leaders of the Protect Kids CA movement came together a few years ago to advocate the reopening of California’s schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. Zachreson said the coalition includes diverse leaders and supporters, including many Democrats and feminists aligned with the Women’s Liberation Front, who are upset about how “the transgender movement has basically infiltrated women’s spaces.”
The proposed initiative includes several components. Among them: It would ensure that schools notify parents and guardians if their student requests to be referred to or treated as a gender different than his or her sex, and require permission to socially transition a child. It would require that sex-segregated facilities be segregated by biological sex. It would allow only females to compete in female athletic competitions. And in most cases it would prohibit the use of puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones for kids and ban the removal or modification of “non-diseased genitals and sex characteristics of children.”
Opponents say the proposal would violate students’ privacy rights and out some transgender kids to their parents, potentially putting them at risk. “The people screaming for ‘parental rights’ are trying to take rights away from my kids while telling me how to raise them,” Kristi Hirst, a students’-rights activist with Our Schools USA told the Times.
But polls show that the issues addressed by the proposed initiative are largely popular among Californians, including many Democrats.
One November poll by SPRY Strategies found that 58.1 percent of Californians strongly agree that parents should be notified if their child identifies as transgender in school, and another 14 percent somewhat agreed.
The poll found that 45.5 percent of respondents strongly supported legislation that restricts males who identify as female from participating on female sports teams, with 13.5 percent somewhat agreeing. And 53.1 percent strongly disagreed with allowing children to undergo gender-reassignment surgery, with another 10.4 percent somewhat disagreeing.
Other polls from firms such as Rasmussen and Gallup have had similar results.
The proposed prohibition on medical interventions is the issue that has the most polling variation based on how the questions are asked, Zachreson said.
“For people who are unaware, they can spin it,” he said. “If you tell people exactly what the procedures are that are happening, almost everybody’s against it for minors. When you speak about it broadly, like Rob Bonta’s trying to do, which is preventing life-saving health care for transgender children, of course you want to provide health care for them.”
The proposed initiative would not prohibit mental-health counseling, he said.
“We’re prohibiting cutting off body parts to treat gender dysphoria,” Zachreson said. “We’re prohibiting altering someone’s hormones to basically stop them from going through puberty, or going through the opposite-sex puberty, and potentially making them sterile.”
The Protect Kids CA leaders initially considered pushing multiple initiatives for the various components, but combined them into one for practical purposes, Zachreson said.
They decided to go directly to voters and around the California legislature and the Democrats who control it, whom Zachreson said have been “captured” on issues involving parental-rights and the transgender movement.
Last year, for example, Democrats refused to hold a hearing on a parental-rights bill. One committee chairman declined to hold a hearing on A.B. 1314 “not only because the bill is proposing bad policy, but also because a hearing would potentially provide a forum for increasingly hateful rhetoric targeting LGBTQ youth.”
Zachreson said that to date Protect Kids CA has raised about $200,000 in grassroots donations to pay for printing costs and marketing, but they are relying on volunteers to gather signatures. They can’t afford to hire professional signature-gatherers, and Bonta’s title for their initiative is turning off potential large donors, who could help pay for them.
Zachreson said that all they want is a neutral title for the initiative, in line with an internal title that the secretary of state’s office is using, “Related to Gender and Educational Institutions.”
Protect Kids CA still has a long way to go, and the clock is ticking. They’re urging California voters to print their petition at home and mail it in soon.
Zachreson said his group believes voters will support their effort if they have the chance.
“We are fully confident that if this is on the ballot, there is no amount of campaigning the other side can run that would defeat this measure,” he said. “The uphill battle is getting on the ballot.”
