Transgender law's foes won't concede defeat

Opponents of a new state law on the rights of transgender students aren't accepting defeat in their attempt to put the issue before the voters, and instead are preparing a long-shot effort to challenge the invalidation of thousands of petition signatures by county registrars.

Supporters of the law, meanwhile, say it's time to work with schools, parents and students to make sure youths' gender identities are respected when they use restrooms or try out for sports teams.

The law, sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, took effect Jan. 1 and is the first of its kind in the nation. It requires public schools to let students use facilities that are "consistent with his or her gender identity," and not necessarily their gender at birth.

Religious conservatives labeled Ammiano's AB1266 the "Coed Restroom Bill" and sought to qualify a referendum to overturn it. Calling their campaign Privacy for All Students, they submitted more than 619,000 petition signatures to counties in November.

They needed 504,760 valid signatures to qualify for the state ballot, and on Monday Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office said a county-by-county review had validated only 487,484 signatures. If the referendum had qualified, the law would have been put on hold until the vote in November.

The 21 percent invalidation rate was not surprising. Elections officials said counties typically disqualify 20 to 30 percent of petition signatures, mostly because they are duplicates or were submitted in the wrong county. As a consequence, backers of ballot measures usually try to collect several hundred thousand signatures more than they need, in contrast to the 105,000-signature surplus submitted for the transgender referendum.

But attorney Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, said sponsors of the referendum campaign don't trust the official results and plan to scrutinize every invalidated signature at county offices over the next 21 days, the period allotted by law.

Making sure

"We have been playing by their rules," Dacus said. "Now it's our turn to go in and make sure they have properly treated signatures as they should be and do not use pretextual reasons to invalidate them."

If they find evidence to dispute the registrars' results, however, their only apparent recourse is to challenge a county's actions in court, where judges typically are deferential to election officials' decisions.

The proponents have a right to review the petitions, but "if they want the counties to again undertake verification, that would be up to a court," said John Arntz, San Francisco's director of elections.

Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a commentator on California politics, said the referendum's apparent failure reflects social conservatives' lack of political power in the state, and also indicates that they don't consider the dispute as important as other issues, like abortion and same-sex marriage.

"I'm not too surprised that a lot of politicians aren't emphasizing this issue, because who wants to spend the next eight months talking about bathrooms?" Pitney said.

Supporters confident

Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, said he was confident Bowen's decision would stand. He said the new law is widely supported by school boards, teachers and PTAs and gained new stature recently when the California School Boards Association issued a model policy for districts around the state.

The law "gives guidance to schools so they understand how to work with (transgender) students and families to ensure access to activities and facilities that other students take for granted," Davis said.