Imagine this.  You send your 13-year-old daughter to her first day of high school.  She goes into the school bathroom, and standing there is a 6′ 2″, 19-year-old male student.  She screams.  But instead of school officials expelling the boy from school and turning him over to the police, your daughter is arrested for committing a hate crime.

Something like that will happen soon in California.  On January 1, the state imposed on children Assembly Bill 1266, mandating that all bathrooms, gym showers, and sports teams in public schools be open to everyone, regardless of sex.  The bill’s official title is the School Success and Opportunity Act.

The bill’s author was Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), a homosexual activist.  Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law on August 12, 2013.  Of the relationship between the two men, a fawning Los Angeles Times reported concerning a different bill, “Ammiano said the two had multiple meetings in Brown’s office, where they discussed its threadbare carpet, their shared Roman Catholicism”—which their policies mock—and legislation.

According to the summary of AB 1266, “This bill requires a pupil be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs, activities, and facilities including athletic teams and competitions, consistent with his/her gender identity, regardless of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.”

Ammiano explained, “Although current California law already protects students from discrimination in education based on sex and gender identity, many school districts do not understand and are not presently in compliance with their obligations to treat transgender students the same as all other students in the specific areas addressed by this bill.”

The individual student, whether from confusion, whim, or curiosity, determines what his or her “gender” is, possibly on a daily basis.  There appear to be, to start with, male, female, bisexual, transsexual, and “questioning.”  But according to the California-based Facebook, there are now 58 “genders.”

The main effect will be that boys, including straight ones with raging hormones, can go into girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.  It’s also likely that some modest girls will “hold it in” all day to avoid being confronted by a naked boy, bringing on health problems not covered under ObamaCare.  Incidences of rape are more likely.  Lawsuits against local school districts and the state could multiply, paid for by yet more tax increases.

Whatever the language or the law, underlying biological realities can’t change.  Each human is born either with two X chromosomes, meaning a female; or an X and a Y chromosome, meaning a male.  The only exceptions are rare instances that, in more sensible times, were dealt with discreetly by parents and school officials, such as by granting a medical exemption from gym class.

The group Privacy for All Students sponsored an initiative to repeal AB 1266. On January 24, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen—a lawyer who was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, which is fortunate to be rid of her—announced that too few signatures had been gathered for the initiative to qualify for the November 4 ballot.  “Election officials found that 78.7 percent of the 619,387 signatures turned in by referendum supporters were valid, for a total of 487,484 valid signatures—17,276 shy of the total needed to put the issue on the ballot later this year,” reported the Los Angeles Daily News.

The matter likely will be decided in court.  “We are ready to review and challenge every signature that was not counted toward the referendum of this impudent and in-your-face bill,” said Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute.

Ammiano verbally assaulted initiative backers as “people that make money off promoting hate and professional fear mongers, who took advantage of what other people didn’t understand.”  In modern America, “promoting hate” is the same as being a “wrecker” under Stalinism.  The accused will be sleeping in the Hotel Gulag—if not quite yet, then soon.

Whatever the initiative’s fate, some good things will come out of this debate.  More Americans will realize that, despite the balmy weather, California might be the worst place outside North Korea in which to raise a family.  A lot of California families might see this as the final whip to the back, forcing an exodus from the Pyrite State.  If the state were honest and didn’t mind quoting a Dead White Male, it would erect signs on state borders reading “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Those who remain will be more likely to get their kids out of what are, here as elsewhere in America, functionally atheist indoctrination centers.  Private, parochial, and home schools remain alternatives.  Even the leftist elite, as we have seen with the children of the Clintons and the Obamas, prefers to keep its kids out of government schools.

Even if AB 1266 is repealed, pity the little children stuck in California’s pedagogical infernos.