Parental rights advanced in deep blue California, as another school district has required teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as transgender.

The Murietta Valley Unified School District (MVUSD) adopted a Parental Notification Policy by a 3-2 vote at its August 10 board of education meeting. Teachers must contact a parent or guardian within three days if their child attempts to use a name, pronoun, restroom, or changing facility of the opposite sex, or compete on a sports team of the opposite sex. Trustees Paul Diffley, Nicolas Pardue, and Julie Vandergrift voted yes; Linda Lunn and Nancy Young voted no.

“This policy is especially helpful for the younger kids who start dabbling with this,” Pardue told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice the day after the vote. Gender transition at increasingly younger ages “has become a fad,” Pardue explained, “because there are some activist teachers who push this agenda.”

Families must be able to shield their children from the predatory transgender industry, said an eyewitness who regrets the brief time she identified as transgender. “Parents deserve to know if their child is adopting a trans identity at school, because [gender] transition is not harmless. There are kids like me being seriously injured by this,” Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy at age 15 before embracing her biological sex within two years, testified at the meeting. “The reality is, sex cannot be changed,” Cole told MVUSD. “As an educational institution, you have a duty to stand for truth. Your policies need to reflect reality and not opinion. You have a duty to stand against ideologies that are held up by low-quality research.”

“The entire trajectory of my life has been altered by delusional ideas that were pushed on me from a young age” and “weaponized by doctors to push a political agenda for monetary gain,” she added. “Socially transitioning is not benign. … It takes away years of necessary social development as your real, biological sex.”

Cole’s testimony “really stuck in my heart, because we all know that teenagers make bad choices, and it is up to us as adults to help them make better choices,” Perdue told Hice. “I was allowed to grow up as an innocent kid,” he said. “When they talk about ‘a safe space,’ the classroom should be a safe space from politics.” 

Murietta Valley is the second school district to adopt a Parental Notification Policy in less than 30 days; neighboring Chino Valley Unified School District passed a similar policy on July 20. “It’s exciting to see parts of California waking up,” said Cole after the vote. “Chino Hills and Murrieta schools are leading the way.” School boards enacting Parental Notification Policies follow their “democratic mandate in ways consistent with medical ethics and court doctrine on parental rights,” said Substack writer Wesley Yang.

Pardue said every level of government should ensure that parents, not government, should be guiding children’s formative views of controversial issues. “Our constitutional rights are what we are supposed to defend as adults and as teachers,” Pardue told the meeting. “The world is surprised and shocked to know there are people who believe in the Constitution who live in California.” If the momentum continues, Cole said, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) “will soon be forced to respect local communities and the U.S. Constitution.”

Yet school districts’ decision to stand with parents has come at a cost. Radical LGBTQ activists immediately barraged CVUSD board of education president Sonja Shaw with threats to kill and dismember her, murder her children, and slaughter her pets. California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) also began investigating the school board — a move leftists urged the AG to take against the Murietta school board six days before MVUSD trustees voted. “[H]ere we go again,” said Voices United for CVUSD, an activist group that opposes parental rights. “Please continue to investigate” such “extreme school boards.”

Bonta promptly announced that he has Murietta in the crosshairs. Bonta intoned that he felt “deeply disturbed to learn another school district” had adopted a parental rights policy — which he described as a “forced outing policy” that allegedly “put at risk the safety and privacy of transgender and gender nonconforming students by adopting a forced outing policy. Parental notification, he said, indicates the school will “target or seek to discriminate against California’s most vulnerable communities. California will not stand for violations of our students’ civil rights.”

“The anti-Christian rhetoric is really intense,” Pardue told Hice. Adherents to extreme gender ideology “assume that Christian parents aren’t going to love their children if they’re struggling with gender identity issues. But having a good, strong relationship with your parents is really the [best] step towards making sure that the children are safe. Knowing that they’re getting a loving response from their parents is really a game changer.”

But the vote has brought positive feedback, as well. “Ever since the vote, I’ve had quite a few emails thanking me” and the whole board for “being a strong voice [and] reestablishing a relationship between the teachers and the parents in our community,” said Pardue. But pro-family advocates say thankfulness should extend nationally. “Parents all across the country owe a debt of gratitude to people like Mr. Pardue, who are willing to stand in the gap for our kids,” said Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at the Family Research Council, later in the program. “We’re really grateful.”

MVUSD’s leadership has received national recognition for the loyalty and enthusiasm it receives from its students. Vista Murietta High School won a $25,000 prize and the title of America’s Most Spirited High School for the third time this year. Pardue predicts enthusiasm for parental rights will also sweep far beyond MVUSD.

“We are not going to be the only district to stand on parental rights,” Pardue told his fellow trustees before the vote. “There are a lot of people with traditional values who are figuring out that the state of California has pulled something over on them.”

Bonta’s harsh administrative crackdown on parental rights proves that “the Left wants believers to stay on the sidelines,” said Hice. “They want you to think that you really don’t matter. But history shows that it only takes one person to spark an enormous change, a movement.” Pardue is living proof that “it does only take one person to make a difference,” he went on.

The most important person who can make a difference in a child’s life is Mom or Dad, because “no one … loves children like a parent does,” said Hice. “And government simply cannot fill the gap.”

This commentary originally was published by The Washington Stand

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