California anti-LGBTQ+ activists want to ram 3 ballot initiatives through in 2024

A coalition of anti-LGBTQ+ conservative groups in California have announced an effort to add three anti-transgender initiatives to the state’s 2024 ballot.

The three proposed ballot initiatives would require schools to notify parents if their child identifies as trans or nonbinary, ban gender-affirming care for minors, and ban trans students from competing on athletics teams that correspond with their gender identity, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

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California Republican Assemblymen Bill Essayli and Joe Patterson announced the initiatives on the steps of the state Capitol in Sacramento earlier this week. They were joined by a group of conservative activists calling themselves Protect Kids California.

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While other states across the country have passed similar anti-LGBTQ+ laws, California’s Democrat-controlled legislature has refused to take up such legislation. Earlier this year, Essayli introduced a bill that would have required California schools to out trans kids to their parents, but it died without a hearing.

As the Chronicle notes, the three ballot initiatives announced on Monday are an effort to circumvent the state legislature’s Democratic supermajority and allow Californians to vote on the policies directly.

“We have to take this directly to the voters,” said Protect Kids California co-founder Jonathan Zachreson.

According to the Sacramento Bee, backers of the three initiatives have until May 9, 2024 to get the nearly 550,000 signatures required to add them to the November 2024 ballot.

LGBTQ+ activists and allies worry that if the initiatives make it onto the ballot, the result could mirror what happened with Proposition 8, the Chronicle reports. In 2008, California voters approved the Proposition 8 ballot initiative, which banned same-sex marriage in the state until the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision on Obergefell v. Hodges established marriage equality as a constitutional right.

Equality California executive director Tony Hoang blasted Republicans for ginning up anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment to turn out voters.

“You can see across the country, these small but vocal extremists are using LGBTQ youth to draw political points — what they believe will draw out folks on their side,” Hoang said. “Those initiatives pull from the same extremist playbooks our opponents have been using for years, really targeting LGBTQ people.”