A proposed policy that would have required California public schools to inform parents if their children change their gender identity has failed to get enough signatures to appear on November’s ballot.
Protect Kids California, the parental rights group that launched the ballot measure, announced Tuesday that they had failed to collect enough signatures. The group collected about 400,000 of the 546,651 signatures required to appear on the ballot.
The deadline to submit the signatures to election officials was Wednesday.
We want to thank our tens of thousands of supporters and volunteers for this truly historic effort!
Together, we collected over 400,000 signatures – an unprecedented achievement for a 100% grassroots effort. You really are amazing! 🙏
While it is unfortunate we did not have… pic.twitter.com/DdRJinW2uY
— Protect Kids CA (@ProtectKidsCA) May 28, 2024
“While we are disappointed we didn’t meet the threshold to qualify for the ballot, we are encouraged by the amount of support from every sector of the state,” said campaign organizer Jonathan Zachreson, one of the group’s co-founders, as well as a Roseville school board member.
Many of the signatures came from the Los Angeles area, Zachreson said.
The ballot initiative essentially had three parts.
The initiative would have banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries on minors and disciplined any violating doctor. It would also have repealed the California law that allows biological males to compete in girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. Finally, the initiative would have prohibited schools from keeping a child’s new gender identity secret from their parents.
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The group said they had faced “severe headwinds” from the beginning.
Back in January, Protect Kids California filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, over his characterization of the ballot initiative.
Bonta had slammed the measure and dubbed it the “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth” initiative in his office’s official summary, which appeared on the petition supporters had to sign to get it on the ballot.
This confused supporters and hampered the parental rights group’s effort to gather signatures, Zachreson said at the time.
“A lot of the feedback is ‘Why did you write the initiative this way?’ and they’re focused on the title and summary and we’re like ‘Well, we didn’t write it. That was Attorney General Rob Bonta,'” Zachreson said.
“While we do feel like it’s going well, it definitely has an interfering effect on the process as well as from a donor perspective as well as for the signature gathering effort,” he said.
In April, a judge denied the parental rights group’s motion. The group still plans to appeal that decision.
“If we had a little more time or a little more money, we would have easily qualified for the ballot,” the group said Tuesday.
