CA Legislator Urged Parents to “Flee” Over Proposed Legislation
If you’re afraid your child might be transgender and after a divorce your spouse and you might disagree over the appropriateness of gender-affirming care, now might be the time to leave the state, apparently.
by Evan Urquhart
One of the quirks of anti-trans media stories is the need to appropriate any language that might make ordinary people feel empathy for trans people, trans children, or families impacted by anti-trans legislation banning their children’s healthcare. Case in point: It’s been well established in the mainstream media that parents fearing political persecution have fled states where anti-trans legislators have plotted to take their children. More recently, parents wishing to ensure their children can access the best-practice treatments for gender dysphoria have been fleeing states where their kids’ prescriptions were outlawed. Unwilling to let “fleeing a state” be a story only for these parents burdened by actual repression from their state governments, Fox News and others have attempted to horn in on the talk of families fleeing. They’ve done this by ampliying the comments of a single CA legislator who suggested families should flee California over a proposed change in the way courts factor gender identity into custody hearings.
The proposed law has been falsely presented by the right as targeting non-affirming parents with child abuse charges, much like what has actually happened to affirming parents in Texas. An opinion column by the leader of Focus on the Family that appeared on the website for Fox News this June claimed, “A radical bill being hotly debated in the Golden State threatens to label parents as child abusers if they decline to ‘affirm’ their son or daughter’s sexual confusion.” This view of the legislation has not been validated by the mainstream press, nor does it seem to accord with quotes from the bill’s author, CA Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, who is the parent of a transgender child.
screenshot from CBS
The facts about the law, or about gender-affirming care’s growing evidence base, were not taken into account by conservatives who have presented it as the first step towards removing children from non-affirming parents. (Very, very rarely Democrats have said they believe failing to affirm trans children is child abuse. Assigned vehemently opposes removing children from parents for this reason.) One CA legislator, Repblican State Senator Scott Wilk, despite acknowledging that the bill only pertains to divorce and custody proceedings, went so far as to urge parents to flee the state of California over the possibility that, if the law passes, a disagreement with their spouse over their transgender child might result in their spouse being viewed more favorably in a custody hearing. "If you love your children, you need to flee California," Wilk is reported to have said by multiple outlets.
The speculative chain of events that could happen if the law passes, and if a conservative parent’s child comes out as trans, and if they also get a divorce, and if their spouse affirms their child while they refuse to, is to put it mildly a very different situation than the one faced by parents in Texas, who have already been investigated by CPS, and who are already unable to continue the course of treatment decided on between them and the child’s doctor. But numerous right-wing media outlets have seen fit to amplify Wilk’s call for everyone who loves their children to flee California.
The fears of parents who’ve already been forced to weigh the cost of leaving their homes, their jobs, friends, and extended family to escape bogus CPS investigations and unconstitutional attacks on their ability to direct medical treatment for their own children are not a joke. The right is making a joke of them, however, by equating their plight to what parents will face with a proposed CA law dealing narrowly with custody disputes in divorce proceedings where parents disagree about the best way to support a transgender child.