A parental rights group in Orange County, Calif., claims 23 students—eight of them elementary age—began social gender transitioning at a local school district without informed parental consent from January 2020 to October 2022.
The group, California Alliance for Education, obtained hundreds of pages of emails and documents from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, which oversees pre-K through grade 12 schools for Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.
A parental rights advocate involved with the alliance who goes by the pseudonym Kim Davis for fear of retaliation told The Epoch Times that in all 23 cases, parents were either not informed about the initiation of their child’s Gender Support Plan, known as a GSP, or were told and did not consent.
“All of these gender support plans were offered to students without any knowledge of the parents. The student is then asked if they want their parents included in the meeting, or to know about it. So, it’s the student’s decision,” Davis said. “It’s possible some of the parents of the 23 children may have been informed later, but the emails show the process of social transition was initiated without their involvement.”
Social transitioning means changing a student’s name, pronouns, and their email address to reflect their new non-binary or transgender identity.
The emails, obtained by The Epoch Times, reveal the following incidents:
• The district created plans to place mental health counselors in elementary schools to initiate GSPs with students without parental consent, and an elementary school principal and a director of student services discussed adding these counselors to assist with GSPs. In the email, the principal instructs a counselor to “build connection” with an elementary student and ask about preferred pronouns without first obtaining parental consent.
• A local LGBT activist pushed for the social transition of an elementary student against a parent’s wishes.
• Elementary school students were socially transitioned without parental consent. In one case, a mom didn’t want her child to transition, and the school moved forward with the social transition of the child anyway.
• A district student services director celebrated more than 500 mental health check-ins by counselors underway at district elementary schools.
• The district made room assignments for sleepover camps, such as sixth-grade Science Camp, based on gender identity instead of biological sex.
• A high school student’s parents did not attend a gender support meeting because the student didn’t want the parents to know.
The public records also show that an activity called Gender and Sexuality Galaxies (pdf) produced by the progressive organization Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights was sent to district counselors and psychologists, and one of the middle school mental health providers has pushed back against the teaching materials.
By Brad Jones
