A national civil rights group may not have standing to sue the state over its policy that allows teachers to hide the gender struggles students may have in the classroom, but parents, children, and teachers do have the standing to file a lawsuit.
“We would encourage any parents who have been affected by this policy or any students who have been affected by this policy to get in touch with us,” said Letitia Kim, managing director of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) organization’s legal network.
FAIR sent a letter to the California government urging it to revise its non-disclosure laws when it comes to how a student identifies his or her gender.
“The Department prohibits schools from disclosing transgender students’ gender identity to their parents unless the student consents or the school believes there is a “specific and compelling need to know,” which the Department considers “very rare,” Kim wrote in her Aug. 10 letter. “The Department also instructs schools to store transgender students’ chosen name and gender in separately-located 'unofficial' records."
In doing so, the state is going too far, according to Kim’s letter, which was addressed to Tony Thurmond, the superintendent of public instruction.
“I would encourage them to respond to us and FAIR would take their response into account,” Kim told the Southern California Record. “I would very much like to see the legal grounds that they would have for imposing this type of a policy. We would furthermore encourage them to change this policy so that it's respectful of parents' rights under the constitution.”
The CDE is acting based on Education Code Section 200 and Assembly Bill 1266, according to media reports.
“A worst case scenario is where you have an adolescent who has socially transitioned at school, is not telling their parents and their parents do not know, and the child secretly obtains medications from some type of a treatment provider,” Kim said. “Taking medication that has as yet unknown long-term effects would be extremely concerning.”
Kim further accuses the CDE of depriving parents their fundamental rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.
"If a student has a name that's different, they're telling the schools that they should move that information into unofficial records thereby placing it beyond the scope of FERPA and making parents unable to get that information, even through FERPA, which is a complete contravention to the statute because simply moving information to a different location does not automatically make it undisclosable," Kim added.