On March 16, a broad coalition of conservative organizations joined forces at Glory Church, a large Korean church in downtown Los Angeles. Inside the former boxing arena, Pastor Richard Shin took the pulpit.
“America was a dream country to most Koreans, including me, 40 years ago. It was a country of freedom, a country of peace,” Shin said in a video recording of the event. “Now America has changed a lot. Our child discusses about transgender with counselors, but parents do not know it. When parents know their children’s transgender operation plan, and they try to stop it, their child could be taken away … Behind this, there is the devil who controls this to take our children away from God.”
Leaders from a variety of faith-based organizations and groups that support so-called “parental rights” addressed the sparse congregation about the ills of “gender ideology.” In the parking lot outside, a handful of right-wing organizers clad in black, including some Proud Boys, stood guard, according to video footage posted on social media. The goal of the gathering, known as the Time to Stand Rally, was to collect signatures for a series of anti-trans initiatives that many conservatives hope will make it on the California ballot in November.
The three initiatives, which conservatives collectively refer to as the Protect Kids Act, would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth statewide, bar transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports and using the girls’ restroom or locker room, and require schools to notify parents if a child says they are transgender.
A pastor at the rally told attendees that it was their “divine obligation” to sign a petition.
Each initiative needs 546,651 signatures by the end of April for the proposals to qualify as ballot measures in the November general election. It is unclear how many signatures each initiative currently has, but the Students First California Committee, which is sponsoring all three initiatives, had raised $82,629 as of January, according to records from the California secretary of state.
Supporters of the initiatives have espoused familiar — and false — rhetoric leveraged by many other conservatives across the country, including baselessly claiming that children are secretly undergoing transition at schools without parental knowledge.
“You cannot wait until it is your child being ripped away from your arms by the California government, so get out there and promote the Protect Kids ballot measures and speak up,” Chloe Cole, a 19-year-old who came to regret undergoing gender-affirming care after transitioning as a minor, said at the rally this month. Cole, who was raised in California’s Central Valley, has become a darling of the anti-trans movement and, with financial backing from a billionaire political donor, has flown across the country to testify in support of anti-trans legislation.
The anti-trans initiatives are a long shot in deep-blue California, which has some of the nation’s strongest civil rights protections, including specifically for LGBTQ+ people and people seeking gender-affirming care and abortion from out-of-state. But there are red pockets across the state, and California conservatives, like conservatives all across the country, are increasingly focusing on rolling back rights for LGBTQ+ people — and making their home state less safe for members of that community in the process. |
