A successful citizens’ referendum to outlaw medicalised gender change for minors in the progressive heartland of California would reverberate nationally and internationally, according to parents’ activist Erin Friday.

“It’s so important that we kill gender ideology in California,” Ms. Friday told Genspect’s sold-out Bigger Picture conference in Denver, Colorado, on Sunday.

“And we can, oddly, even though California is so crazy liberal. The people can do it. We’ve got a [referendum] ballot initiative that will stop boys in girls’ sports. It’ll stop the secret transition of children at school, and it will stop gender [medicine] interventions on children. This is a ballot initiative that is polling between 64 and 75 per cent in California.

“California started this [gender craze], California has to end it. We influence every other state in the union.”

Ms. Friday, a lifelong Democrat and Californian lawyer whose daughter used to believe she was a boy, co-founded the non-partisan group Protect Kids California (PKC) with Republican loyalist Jonathan Zachreson.

PKC is seeking donations to drive its campaign to gather about 850,000 signatures—some may be challenged as invalid and excluded from the necessary count of almost 550,000 validated signatures—so that the ballot initiative may be put to voters at the same time as the 2024 national elections.

In its updated, October 30 form, a proposed 3-in-1 initiative under the title Protect Kids of California Act covers gender medicine, parental rights and fairness in female sport.

In part, the new combined initiative says—

“Gender dysphoria and other gender-related mental health disorders naturally resolve in the vast majority of children when children are allowed to go through uninterrupted puberty and reach maturity.

“Many of the medical interventions offered to minors utilize pharmaceuticals, hormones or surgical procedures which are not approved for treating gender dysphoria or gender identity disorders for children. There are no long-term studies demonstrating the efficacy and safety of gender-related medical interventions on children.

“Countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland no longer recommend gender-related medical interventions on children, with very limited exceptions.

“The use of drugs, hormones, and surgeries that pose a substantial risk for irreversible and material side effects on a child’s body including, but not limited to, reproductive sterility should be prohibited for minor children before eighteen (18) years of age. The [California] legislature recognizes that young people are immature and fail to appreciate risks and consequences.”

Dimes or dollars?

California’s Attorney General, charged with estimating the fiscal effect of a citizen’s initiative, argues a paediatric transition ban would bring “potentially relatively minor savings” and suggests there could be penalties for the state to pay if the ban is deemed contrary to federal law (a prospect talked up by the Biden administration’s Justice Department.)

Ms. Friday told GCN she believed the savings would amount to millions of dollars, pointing out that a public data request in Pennsylvania—a state with about half the number of gender dysphoria diagnoses of California—revealed that $16.7 million in public funds was spent on youth gender medicine from 2015-22. The annual figure had risen from $78,000 in 2015 to $3.9m in 2021.

On this basis, California’s public funding for paediatric transition could be $8m or more per year, Ms. Friday said.

Bigger, smarter

At the Denver conference, Genspect’s founder, Irish psychotherapist Stella O’Malley launched the organisation’s “unashamed, non-medicalised” Gender Framework document as a stark contrast to the latest standards of care from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which had abruptly abandoned most of its guideline’s minimum age thresholds for medical interventions.

There was much speculation at the historic Genspect conference on the state of the “gender war”; political scientist Wilfred Reilly offered a parallel with the battle of Gettysburg in the US civil war.

“The larger side, with the better ideas, is getting organised now,” he said.

Wrong, doomed

At age 11, Ms. Friday’s daughter succumbed to gender confusion enabled by her school and an outside activist allowed into the classroom, with the transgender ideology sending the message that her body was “wrong”, and she was destined for suicide.

“My daughter would tell me, it doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m going to die…  add to it that she’s told her parents hate her.

“Imagine the anguish that that child feels—I’m wrong, I’m going to die. And I am unloved. This is a cruel, cruel movement. And it needs to end.”

Grateful for other parents who helped her manage her daughter’s recovery Ms. Friday threw herself into the emerging movement pledged to end gender medicalisation of children.

“Imagine for one second what would happen if California stops this [gender ideology]?” she said. “That changes not just the United States—it’ll change the world.”

She cited the sheer scale of the gender medical industry in California, the long reach of the Democratic state’s influence, its “trans sanctuary” measures to attract runaway children and gender clinicians from the 22 Republican states which have restricted paediatric transition, and its cross-border promotion of “gender-affirming care” led by Governor Gavin Newsom.

All this would “continue to create more gender dysphoric kids… so, it never ends until it ends in our state,” Ms. Friday said.

A PKC flyer says: “As California goes, so goes the nation. If just one of these three initiatives is successful in deep blue [Democratic] California, it changes the playbook and direction of addressing these issues across the nation.”

 

Chart: California stands out in data showing the rise of gender dysphoria diagnoses among minors. Source: Reuters

 

Language games

Under California’s direct democracy system, PKC initially put up three initiatives—the Protect Children from Reproductive Harm Act, the School Transparency and Partnership Act and the Protect Girls’ Sports and Spaces Act.

The reproductive measure—which PKC says “prevents the sterilisation of children by prohibiting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, genital surgeries and mastectomies for minors”—has the strongest polling result (75 per cent) of the three, with support from 67 per cent of sampled Democrat voters, 89 per cent of Republicans and 77 per cent of independent/other voters.

California’s Attorney General is given the politically significant task of crafting titles and summaries for citizens’ initiatives. On November 1, PKC’s Protect Children from Reproductive Harm Act emerged with the government’s title “PROHIBITS GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE FOR MINORS.”

The state’s summary of PKC’s measure begins—

“Prohibits health care providers from providing transgender patients under 18 with medical care to affirm a gender identity that differs from the minor’s gender assigned at birth. Prohibits such treatment even if parents consent or it is medically recommended for the minor’s mental or physical wellbeing.”

Ms. Friday said the state government was playing “language games so that we look hateful.”

PKC intends to challenge the Attorney General’s characterization and has amalgamated its three proposed statutes into one citizens’ initiative.