Monday night the tally was in – the effort to repeal the School Success and Opportunity Act (AB1266) failed to qualify for the ballot. The Privacy For All Students (PFAS) coalition, the coalition that spearheaded a petition drive effort to put AB1266 up for referendum this November, collected 619,387 signatures from across California for that attempt. Of those 619,387 signatures PFAS provided to the California secretary of state, 504,760 of those signatures needed to be verified as valid voter signatures, but after months of checking the signatures, only 487,484 were found to be valid.
“The referendum’s proponents got 487,484 valid signatures and 131,903 disqualified signatures,” stated Richard Poppen, an Equality California (EQCA) board member. “They’ve been rattling their sabers about challenging the count in court. But to win and qualify, they would have to get 17,276 signatures un-disqualified, about 13.1 percent of the disqualified signatures. That is, they’d have to claw back more than one disqualified signature in eight. That’s a very tall order.”
The opponents of AB1266 have argued that cisgender teenage boys will pretend to be transgender girls to obtain access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms and engage in inappropriate and unlawful behavior. For example, Liberty Counsel founder and director Matt Staver stated in World Net Daily, “Giving students the right to use dressing rooms, locker rooms and restrooms based on their subjective self-perceived sex, regardless of their birth gender, is unconscionable and extremely dangerous to children. Now, girls in elementary and high school will be forced to shower and change in locker rooms with boys masquerading as a girl. When an incident happens – and no question, it will – Gov. Brown will have the innocence of that abused girl on his hands. This is not about intolerance or hatred or bigotry: it is about biology, which you cannot change, and common sense, which seems rare today.”
What the opponents of AB1266 have proposed is incredible: discrimination against the minority transgender student population in all California K-12 public schools because of an imagined fear that inappropriate behavior by students who aren’t even transgender may occur. Speaking locally, boys pretending to be girls to engage in inappropriate behavior in San Diego public school bathrooms and locker rooms hasn’t occurred in the 9-plus years San Diego Unified has had a transgender policy in place – a policy that closely resembles the recently released model California School Board Association policy that informs school districts statewide how to implement AB1266.
The kind of discrimination that the opponents of AB1266 propose as a solution to imagined behavior of cisgender male students is just plain un-Californian and un-American.
In California we ideally hold individuals responsible for their own behavior; we just shouldn’t hold an entire minority population responsible for imagined inappropriate behavior by people who aren’t even members of that minority population.
PFAS has indicated they’re definitely going to look for those 17,000 signatures they need to put AB1266 on the ballot. “The secretary of state, along with officials in the 58 counties is charged with validating the signatures presented,” said Gina Gleason, a spokesperson for PFAS. “Only after the secretary of state announces her count do we get a chance to look at the signatures that were thrown out and begin to challenge those results.”
“Many counties set a very high threshold to declare a signature valid,” added Kevin Snider, an attorney with the Pacific Justice Institute. “But the courts have repeatedly set a standard that is much friendlier to the voter offering his or her signature. Unfortunately the referendum proponents will have to ask a judge to step in to assure that all valid signatures are counted.”
Others look at the positives associated with AB1266.
“This law gives schools the guidelines and flexibility to create an environment where all kids have the opportunity to learn,” said Masen Davis, Transgender Law Center executive director in a recent public statement. “We need to focus on creating an environment where every student is able to do well and graduate. This law is about doing what’s best for all students – that’s why it’s supported by school boards, teachers and the PTA.”
What Davis said is where we should leave it. Monday was a good day for trans California students.
Well, I don’t know that this is over. I rather suspect there will be challenges filed, and if it turns out that there was any, shall we say, hanky-panky on the part of the Secretary of States’s office, this could blow up in your faces. If the count was fair, that is one thing, but if the count was biased, the proposition may well pass, just on that basis. You probably would have been better off if they had allowed it to go to a vote. As it is, it appears that the law is, so far, being interpreted far more conservatively than the extremists planned. So, it may well be moot anyway.
So how’d that challenge go? Pretty sure the law is being interpreted as written, because it wasn’t exactly complex in it’s terminology. Extremists are all in your head
The first accusation of sexual misconduct by one of these boys in a dress will put an end to this violation of women’s spaces.
Anne
Or perhaps the claim by the girl who claimed to have been assaulted (and was largely ignored by all of the M2T contingent) only to later recant will serve as the impetus to wake people up as to how insipid the whole thing is.
Trans is in the midst of doing everything that they can to wake the real world up as to how stupid some of their demands are. The cake for the masses will be jumping on Ellen for her nod to gay culture (where drag queens resided for years before being colonized by trans-Inc). If trans doesn’t remember that drag queens have been doing Liza for years and don’t get bent out of shape at being called a guy or sir, then they have a convenient case of amnesia.