Orange, California, School Board Creeps Who Voted To Out Trans Kids Tossed Out In Recall

That's in the city of Orange. Not that we'd be surprised if they copied That Man's makeup.

Mar 20, 2024

two long-coated white-and-black puppies on hammock — Not really related to the school board recall, but they’re happy doggos. Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

Voters in Orange, California, recalled two rightwing school board members who last fall pushed through a policy requiring that schools notify parents if a kid asked “to be identified as a gender other than that student’s biological sex or the gender listed on the birth certificate or any other official records.”

The recall election in the Orange Unified School District last week removed Rick Ledesma, a longtime board member who’d been its president, and Madison Miner, who’d been elected to the board in 2022. By Friday, the vote totals in their recalls were well over 53 percent for removing each, with very few votes left to count.

The Los Angeles Times reports that many of the most vociferous supporters of the “aggressively conservative” positions taken by the board

included some district parents, but many attending the board’s most raucous meeting in September were religious conservatives without children in public schools, including some from well outside the community.
There was always uncertainty about the extent to which this cheering section represented a majority of parents and educators in a diverse school system of about 25,000 students.

Parent Darshan Smaaladen, a leader of the recall effort, noted the “national trend” of rightwing “school board takeovers” by people pushing culture war issues, but said that for recall supporters, “it wasn’t about politics. It was about taking politics and personal agendas out of the school board and making students the first priority.”

“Parental notification” policies like the one instituted in Orange last fall have been a popular issue for rightwing activists who want to use the existence of trans people as a wedge to gain political power. Even Blue Blue California has seen its share of rightwing culture warring, complete with freakouts over LGBTQ+ persons in or adjacent to textbooks and bomb threats aimed at libraries.

But in California, at least, there’s been substantial pushback, including a lawsuit by state Attorney General Rob Bonta against the notification policy in the Chino schools, with the aim of having all such policies thrown out as a violation of LGBTQ+ students’ rights. In a statement when he filed the lawsuit last August, Bonta said,

“The forced outing policy wrongfully endangers the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of non-conforming students who lack an accepting environment in the classroom and at home.”

OK, but what about the rights of parents, who own their children, to disown them for being LGBTQ+? No one ever seems to speak up for the bigots, except the entire Republican Party and evangelical Right.

Meanwhile, the LA Times notes, there’s a petition drive by supporters of violating students’ rights for a ballot measure that would impose the policy statewide.

At the crazypants board meeting last September in which the rightwing board members adopted the notification policy, competing pro- and anti-notification demonstrators outside the meeting room had to be kept apart by police, and there was no shortage of shouting matches in the meeting, either.

Eventually, the three board members who opposed the forced-outing policy walked out, citing concerns for their safety, and at 11:30 at night, the four rightwing board members passed the resolution in a four-to-nothing vote.

Prior to that, Ledesma insisted during the meeting that trans kids absolutely must be outed to their parents, what business of the school’s is it to force kids to turn trans (which they don’t) or keep “secrets” from parents who always know best (which they don’t)?

“Parents decide to conceive a child,” he said at the time. “Then the mother carries the child for nine months — we all know this — only to send their child eventually to school and [for the child] to be told to keep a secret, and because supposedly it comes down from the state.
“So my concern there is this child keeping a secret and, you know, potentially there’s lies being said, and this child is 12 years old ... [and] is ready to change their lives forever.”

Mind you, no children are able to seek medical treatment without at least one parent’s permission, but we guess having their preferred name and pronouns acknowledged at school is a kind of changing their lives forever.

The policy adopted in Orange, like those passed in several other California districts, requires parents be notified if a student requests “to use a name that differs from their legal name or to use pronouns” that are different from those on their official records, with an exception for common nicknames bases on their given names.

The notification requirement also covers attempts by a student to take part in athletic activities or use facilities such as a bathroom when that action doesn’t align with the student’s birth-certificate gender.

Smaaladen told the LA Times that the recall movement actually got started after the board voted in January 2023 to fire then-Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen, with no explanation and following a closed-door meeting. We can see how that might annoy parents! The new rightie majority also passed a few symbolic but empty culture war gestures, but it was the forced-outing policy that really galvanized support for the recall.

Ousting Ledesma and Miner won’t remove the policy, but it’s a good first step. The remaining five members on the board can now either appoint two new members to serve until this fall’s general election, or could decide to hold a special election before then. Either way, it’ll probably be condemned as wokeness run amok.

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