How California Wants To ‘Protect’ Children With Gender Ideology

In 2021, Hungary enacted a law to protect children from gender ideology propaganda. The law establishes the normativity of the family arising from the man-woman relationship in marriage and bans instruction on other ‘lifestyle’ models in schools. It returned as a flashpoint earlier this year in the controversy over the Budapest ‘Pride’ parade.

Passage of the 2021 law generated the usual protests from the usual quarters, especially the EU Commission, roundly denouncing it as a violation of ‘European values’ and ‘rights.’ In due course, the Commission decided to launch yet another infringement procedure against Hungary, while a case against the country over the law is pending in the European Court of Justice. The law was enacted at the beginning of the Biden Administration in the United States—an administration wholly in thrall to gender ideology—which lost no time attacking the law and marshaling American diplomats to criticize it.  

The Hungarian government’s rationale for adopting this law was explicitly to protect Hungarian children from gender ideology. If one doubts that motive, consider what the “other side” of the question proposes to make law. Three bills are currently pending in the California state legislature which would severely undermine parental rights.  They would be illegal under Hungarian legislation but likely embraced by EU institutions.

Assembly Bill (AB) 1084 accelerates name and public record changes for minors who want to adopt new names conforming to their ‘gender identity.’  The bill directs courts to grant such requests to adults making such requests within two weeks. The same norm applies to minors if both “living parents” co-signed the petition to the court.

But it doesn’t stop there. If either (or presumably, both) “living parents” did not sign the petition, the court is to hold a hearing to consider whether there is “good cause” behind their abstention. The law also makes explicit that rejection of gender and transitioning ideologies is not “good cause” for an objection preventing a name change. 

Consider what consequences AB 1084 entails:

1. It makes the state a liar in terms of its public records by altering them to conform to current psychological preferences rather than the factual biological reality in which a person was born.
2. It abridges parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s upbringing. The state arrogates the power to decide and authorize a name change. The state decides that the values with which a parent seeks to raise a child can be trumped by the state’s value preferences.
3. It destabilizes marriage. If one parent approves the name change and the other does not, it inserts the state as the arbiter of that intra-spousal/parental dispute. It also will likely discriminate against the dissenting parent in any future divorce or custody proceedings.
4. It offers no justification why such a process should be imposed on parents while a minor remains in their care and custody when that same change can be effected by that child upon attaining the age of majority. It thus makes the state a de facto ‘co-parent’ of the mother and father.

Assembly Bill 727 changes California requirements pertaining to school identification cards. Currently, California prints the emergency telephone number of the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on the school identification cards of all students in grades 7-12.

Last spring, the new Trump Administration announced it was discontinuing Lifeline referrals to other institutions that explicitly promote gender ideology. The Trevor Project, with which Lifeline had previously made referrals, is a private and explicitly pro-’LGBTQ’ gender ideology group.

AB 727 would require California student identification cards also explicitly to list the Trevor Project number. Advocates employ the siren call of “combating LGBTQ+ suicide” threats to justify the change. They do not explain why a national suicide line is insufficient.

The truth is that, again, California chooses to put its finger on the values scales not just to expose but to connect minors to organizations that will ‘affirm’ children’s ‘gender identity’ (or confuse them further) without parental involvement. California wants to connect minors—without parental knowledge or consent—to adults to talk about sex, not necessarily in ways those parents endorse. What could go wrong with that?

Finally, AB 495—the “Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025—embodies Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s adage, “never let a crisis go to waste.” Capitalizing on fears in California’s illegal immigrant population about the Trump Administration arresting illegals, AB 495 allows a “nonrelative extended family member” to present a “Caregivers Authorization Certificate” entitling that non-parent to enroll or disenroll a minor from school, pick the child up from school, and/or authorize medical treatment. The revised certificate says explicitly—three times—that a parent’s signature is not required.

The bill’s sponsor tries to minimize concerns by insisting she simply wants somebody to be able to care for a minor if the child’s parents are picked up as illegal immigrants. The sponsor fails to talk about how the recipient of such a certificate should know that the parents are inaccessible or that the intentions of the bearer are to be trusted. Does being able to authorize a minor’s medical treatment without explicit parental approval include, for example, hormonal therapy to prevent puberty? Abortion? (Fairfax County, adjacent to Washington, D.C., is already roiled in controversy over a public school official facilitating two minors’ abortions without parental consent, even though Virginia state law currently requires it).

None of these things would be allowed in Hungary. That law has been under attack by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who denounced it because she “believe[s] in a Europe which embraces diversity, not one which hides it from our children.” 

Does that ‘European diversity’ mean parents can be forced to ‘affirm’ their child’s gender mutilation?’ Compelled to approve their exercise of ‘rights’ by having an abortion (except, maybe, in retrograde Poland or Malta)? Does it mean children should be put in touch with gender ideologue activists pushing sexual visions that parents might “hide … from our children”? That the state should do that? That ‘fundamental European values’ might mean minors changing their names and civil documents without parental consent? That ‘well-meaning adults’ can substitute their consent for a parents’ when it comes to issues involving minors?

Let’s be honest about what von der Leyen’s ‘diversity’ means. It means another version of the dictatorship of relativism, a vision that calls itself tolerant but is in fact radically intolerant of any vision that believes there are norms and that, in the case of children, parents should set them. It is a ‘diversity’ that claims it knows better than parents what is truly “good” for their children.

It is an axiological vision from which Hungary rightly protected its children.