California is frequently on the leading edge of societal trends.   Some of these ideas really are not worthy of emulation and we’ve gotta pray that a bill passed last week in the California assembly will not take hold nationwide.

WORLD Magazine calls it the “transgender bathroom bill.” The bill passed the state senate earlier, and if Governor Jerry Brown signs it, it will allow transgender students, K through 12, to choose which restrooms and locker rooms they wish to use and which sports team they’d like to join based upon their gender identity. Gender identity is not necessarily the gender you were born as, but the one you feel the most comfortable in.

Sixteen other states have outlawed what’s being called discrimination based upon someone’s gender expression. But California is the first state to apply the concept specifically to schools.

Maybe it’s the beautiful weather. Or perhaps it’s the Left’s euphoria over the demise of Proposition 8, California’s law protecting marriage from being expanded to same-sex couples. Or maybe too many California legislators have simply lost it.  But there are some obvious problems with this legislation. One senator, Jim Neilson, who voted against the bill, put it mildly when he said, “Elementary and secondary students of California—our most impressionable, our most vulnerable—now may be subjected to some very difficult situations.” He told WORLD, that some parents and students would be “extraordinarily uncomfortable with what this bill would impose upon them.”

“Transgendered” is the term used to describe people who are in some way not satisfied with being male or female. This dissatisfaction will likely to lead to one or more of a broad spectrum of lifestyles, from cross-dressing to varying degrees of sex change. Supporters of the transgender bathroom bill say it’s needed to protect transgendered students from bullying and abuse.

But this approach will not protect transgendered kids. Rather it risks severely harming them. It’s another measure, in a string of misguided California legislation, that serves to lock students into sexual or gender identities they might be struggling with.

California recently passed another law that criminalizes psychological counseling that seeks to help young people battle homosexual attractions and inclinations. Brad Dacus, President of the Pacific Justice Institute, worked hard to oppose that bill. Now, he argues that enacting this law would not only usher in the obvious danger to girls who will find young men present where they are changing and showering, but would also hurt those kids truly facing gender disorders. He says: “To completely truncate the role of psychologists and counselors in this process, much less the rights of parents, is a travesty to the welfare, proper development, and possible healing of these young people.”

Rather than enable gender identity disorder in a child, Proverbs 22:6 says we should train each child— “in the way he should go.”  Sometimes we must wait until “he is old” to see the fruit.