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Column: California's transgender sanctuary law survives a challenge as judge ridicules plaintiff's claims
In 2022, when legislation outlawing gender-affirming medical treatments erupted in mostly red-state legislatures across the land, California enacted a law creating a sanctuary for those whose treatments were blocked by the lawmakers.
SB 107, which was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom that September, provided a safe harbor for people from those states who sought the treatment in California, where it’s legal.
The law prohibited the release of medical information about a patient if it was sought from a state that made the treatments illegal, and forbade the arrest or extradition of medical providers in California if the request came from authorities in states that had criminalized the treatments.
Our Watch firmly believes that transgenderism is a cultural issue that it must deal with in accordance with God’s design for every child, as outlined in the Bible.
— Our Watch vs. Bonta
Unsurprisingly, SB 107 became the target of right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+ activists in California. On Tuesday, federal Judge Dale A. Drozd of Sacramento dismissed an effort to declare the law unconstitutional.
It was the third attempt by the plaintiff, a nonprofit affiliated with a conservative Christian church in Temecula that says its mission is to “restore Christian-Judeo values in government and education,” to win Drozd’s approval for its lawsuit. This time, Drozd, plainly fed up with the plaintiff’s serial inability to make its case, forbade it to try again because any further filing would be, as he wrote, “futile under the circumstances.”
Whether Drozd’s ruling will hold up under any appeal or whether the law itself can survive any other lawsuits to overturn it is impossible to say. But the lawsuit filed last year by the nonprofit Our Watch with Tim Thompson (he’s the pastor of the Temecula church) is nevertheless instructive. Our Watch was represented in court by lawyers affiliated with Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a Murrieta organization that lists “parental rights” and “the rights of children, both born and unborn,” among its concerns.
The lawsuit opens a window on the lengths to which zealots and fanatics will go to interfere with the activities of others because they conflict with their own narrow ideologies. There’s a polite name for them: “busybodies.”
The case also underscores how our personal rights are perched on a judicial knife edge in today’s America. There’s ample reason to believe that if such a case were to land in front of a Trump-appointed judge — U.S. Judge Matthew Kaczmaryk of Amarillo, Texas, for instance — the law would have been invalidated in a heartbeat. Appeal would have been taken to the Trump-infested 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and perhaps ultimately to the Supreme Court, where its fate might be sealed.
After all, that’s been the arc of Kaczmaryk’s ruling invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. In that case, Kaczmaryk and the 5th Circuit judges bought into the plaintiffs’ fanciful assertions that, as doctors, the prospect of medication abortions caused them “mental and emotional stress”; appeals judge James C. Ho rationalized upholding Kaczmaryk’s mifepristone ban by commenting, “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”
That didn’t happen here because Drozd, an Obama appointee, can recognize a factitious claim for standing when it swims into his ken.
I’ve written before that transgender individuals have become the prime targets for discriminatory legislation in part because socially acceptable targets for hate-mongering and prejudice have become harder for conservative culture warriors to find.
As I observed in 2018, open racism is out (though it made a strong comeback in the Trump era and in the hands of commentators such as Tucker Carlson). In an increasingly pluralistic society, legislators who denigrated ethnic or religious minorities or those with mental illnesses or disabilities found themselves on the outs.
Gay and lesbian Americans have moved into the cultural and social mainstream. Many conservative families have found themselves embracing gay and lesbian siblings, children and parents as worthy of familial love and respect. Same-sex marriage has become embedded in the entertainment mainstream, portrayed on popular TV programs without apology.
Moreover, gay and lesbian people acquired a voice in the highest echelons of political power; gay-bashing no longer works for a political candidate as it has in the past, except perhaps in the most benighted corners of American society.
That leaves gender transition, which is easily caricatured and demonized by unscrupulous politicians aiming to rally their base against a wholly imaginary crisis. By early 2022, according to Human Rights Watch, 130 bills had been introduced in state legislatures. Many barred transgender youths from playing on sports teams or using bathrooms other than those designated for their birth gender.
As of this year, 23 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming treatments for youths; some carry prison terms for violations or restrict insurance coverage. In Florida parents who allow such treatments for their children can lose custody; in Texas, they can be investigated for child abuse. Florida, Ohio and Missouri have implemented restrictions even on gender transition treatments for adults. A Florida rule barring Medicaid coverage for gender treatments was blocked by a federal judge, whose ruling is currently under appeal.
This is the environment that prompted California to enact its sanctuary law. Its law resembled the state’s effort to become a sanctuary for women seeking abortions that their home states had rendered illegal in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022.
The plaintiff in this case left no question that its action was grounded in fundamentalist anti-transgender bias. “Our Watch firmly believes that transgenderism is a cultural issue that it must deal with in accordance with God’s design for every child, as outlined in the Bible,” the lawsuit says.
As so often occurs, the plaintiff’s case against the California law is a melange of misdirection and misrepresentations.
Our Watch positioned its lawsuit as an effort to protect the right “of parents to raise their children” without governmental interference. It depicted SB 107 as a law that “allows minors to obtain gender transition procedures like harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries without parental consent, while denying parents access to their child’s medical information.”
This is a flatly inaccurate characterization of the law. It also turns the law’s goal on its head.
The truth is, as Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta observed in his response to the lawsuit, California law gives parents the right to access their children’s medical records. “Nothing in SB 107 changes that,” he noted. Further, he wrote, all those procedures listed in the lawsuit “generally require parental consent in California” — another regulation unaffected by SB 107.
The whole purpose of the California law, Bonta wrote, was to give parents of children seeking gender-affirming care refuge from out-of-state laws that interfered with their right to obtain medically indicated care for their children — not to allow such care over parents’ objections.
The lawsuit painted a picture of physicians willy-nilly imposing radical, irreversible gender-affirming treatments on innocent adolescents whose “gender dysphoria” (the medical term for gender uncertainties) might be transient and resolve themselves over time or with counseling.
That’s a caricature of the standard of care for gender dysphoria as it’s implemented by physicians following established protocols. The truth is that “prior to the onset of puberty, kids typically receive non-medical care,” explained Boston University psychologist Melissa K. Holt during a roundtable discussion of care for youths in 2022.
Care for prepubescent children, Holt said, “is focused around social transitioning,” such as choosing a new name and adopting different dress, “and providing mental health and structural support, like schools using a child’s preferred gender pronouns and allowing them to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity…. There are no 4-year-olds going through irreversible medical procedures.”
Drugs such as puberty blockers and hormone treatments are typically administered only as children move into adolescence, are viewed as safe, and are expected to be used only after discussions with medical providers. Medical protocols discourage gender reassignment surgery before the age of 18. But professionals in the field say that outlawing such treatments or even counseling for younger children can produce long-standing psychological problems.
Much of the lawsuit’s argument was self-refuting. “Parents, not the government, are best suited to decide” on their child’s medical treatment, the lawsuit says. Exactly; so how do SB 107’s opponents explain state laws that allow the government to impose its judgment over the parents? The lawsuit is silent on that question.
In dismissing the case, Drozd didn’t address those issues, because he found that the lawsuit had a more fundamental shortcoming: The plaintiff didn’t have standing to bring the case at all.
“Standing” is a concept derived from the U.S. Constitution, which holds, roughly, that litigants in federal court must show that they’re directly harmed by a government action and that their lawsuit will remedy the injury. Our Watch couldn’t meet that requirement, Drozd ruled.
Our Watch claimed that it was “directly harmed” by SB 107 because the law prompted it to “divert our attention to transgender issues” rather than “tackling major cultural issues that violate Christian-Judeo values, including the sexual indoctrination of children, … critical race theory, and abortion.” (Not to be churlish, but some people might be relieved that SB 107 narrowed the organization’s involvement in such overheated culture wars.)
Our Watch “plans to expend money on conferences to connect key stakeholders who are also fighting against the devastating effects of SB 107,” the lawsuit stated.
It wasn’t hard for the judge to see through this argument. Plaintiffs can’t “manufacture standing” through their own choices, he ruled: Our Watch’s “decision to place more focus and correspondingly commit more of its resources to ‘transgender issues’ … was a voluntary decision — not a forced one.”
The culture wars over gender issues are sure to continue because they rely on public ignorance and prejudice — always the preferred weaponry of demagogues. The lawsuit to overturn California’s sanctuary law had, at its core, nothing to do with protecting children. If it did, its promoters wouldn’t have had to gin up a cause of action where none existed.
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San José tech company Cisco plans to cut 471 workers in three Bay Area offices, according to layoff notices filed to a state agency.
The company, which provides networking devices along with other services including video conferencing and cybersecurity, told employees in May that it was going to cut fewer than 4,000 jobs or less than 5% of its workforce.
The notices, processed by the California Employment Development Department this week, provide more details about what jobs Cisco will cut in California.
The artificial-intelligence boom has fueled more investments in data centers, commercial real estate and other areas. But advancements in AI tools have also been reshaping jobs, especially in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the tech industry.
Cisco’s layoffs in California impacted workers in its San José, Milpitas and San Francisco offices. The company cut a variety of roles in software engineering, product management, design, business operations and other areas, the notices show.
Cisco said it didn’t have anything additional to share beyond what it published in May about its restructuring plans.
Tech companies have been citing various reasons for layoffs including prioritizing investments in artificial intelligence. As workers use AI-powered tools to generate code, words and other content, some executives have said they don’t need as many employees. There’s also skepticism, though, about how big a role AI is playing at companies with a large amount of workers globally.
From January to May, U.S. technology companies announced 123,653 cuts, up 66% from the same period in 2025, according to a June report from global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The firm said that AI was the leading reason companies cited for cuts but it still isn’t the “jobpocalypse some predicted.”
Meta, Snap, Block, Oracle and Amazon are among tech companies that have announced mass layoffs this year.
Cisco markets itself as a company that “provides critical infrastructure for the AI era” and has benefited from the AI boom, reaching a record revenue of $15.8 billion in the third quarter this year. The company’s net income grew 35% to $3.4 billion year-over-year during that quarter.
Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins told employees in May it’s cutting costs in certain areas while prioritizing other investments. That includes employee use of AI across the company.
He said Cisco will be among winners in the AI era, but that means “making hard decisions — about where we invest, how we’re organized, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us.”
As of July 2025, Cisco had roughly 86,200 employees, according to its annual report.
Social media company Snap is being sued by the parents of a girl who was raped when she was 12 years old by a man she met on disappearing messaging app Snapchat.
The 111-page lawsuit, filed this week in a Missouri Circuit Court, alleges that Santa Monica-based Snap “enabled and facilitated the grooming, exploitation, and sexual abuse” of the minor who is referred to as “J.F.”
The company failed to disable or warn users about “dangerous” features that predators use on the app to find and abuse their victims, according to the lawsuit.
Missouri resident Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, who was 25 years old at the time, raped the girl in September 2021 after she sneaked out of her house, the lawsuit alleges. The parents are also suing the attacker, who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the girl and is serving 18 years in prison, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center.
The center and the Holland Law Firm announced Thursday they filed the lawsuit on behalf on the victim’s family.
“This assault did not happen in a vacuum — it happened because Snapchat’s product design made it easy for a predator to reach and manipulate an unsuspecting child,” said Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, in a statement. “Snap executives have long known that their features create a perfect environment for predators to exploit children, yet they have repeatedly failed to make the platform safe.”
A Snap spokesperson said in a statement the company cares “deeply about the safety and well-being of all Snapchatters.”
“Our teams have worked for years to build safeguards, launch safety tutorials, partner with experts, and work with law enforcement to help prevent the misuse of our platform,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The lawsuit is the latest legal hurdle facing Snap. Multiple parents who lost their children have previously sued the company, alleging that Snap failed to provide enough safeguards on the messaging app. Parents and child safety groups have voice concerns about how the app can be used to connect young people with drug dealers and child predators.
Other tech companies such as gaming platform Roblox, Google-owned YouTube and Facebook parent company Meta have also faced lawsuits over safety and mental health issues.
In March, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta-owned Instagram and YouTube were liable for the suffering of a California woman who alleged the platforms were built to addict young users. Snap settled that lawsuit before the trial started.
The latest lawsuit against Snap highlights safety concerns surrounding several features on the messaging app including “Quick Add,” which suggests users to connect with on Snapchat. Valentin-Rios used that feature to connect with the girl along with others to disguise his identity and groom her into sending explicit photos, the lawsuit said. The company’s “Snap Maps” feature allowed him to find the girl’s home address. And he used a cartoon avatar known as Bitmoji on Snapchat to conceal his age and present himself as a “a young, innocuous, and friendly looking boy.”
Families have faced challenges holding tech companies accountable for safety issues because a U.S. law shields platforms from being held liable for content posted by its users.
The lawsuit against Snap, though, says that it seeks to hold the company liable for the design and marketing of “unreasonably dangerous social media products.” It alleges that Snap co-created content such as Bitmojis abused by child predators and it designed the app to entice users to spend more time messaging others.
The lawsuit accused Snap of consistently turning a “blind eye” to underage users of its app. Snapchat requires users be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account, but J.F. started using the app when she was 11 years old. Snapchat was popular among her peers and friends so J.F. downloaded the app, which was presented as lighthearted and entertaining platform, without her parents’ knowledge or consent. The company failed to warn users about potential dangers, verify the ages of minors and lacks adequate parental controls, the lawsuit alleges.
Snapchat has a “family center” where parents can see their teen’s friends, view time spent and other insights about how their children are using the app. But the lawsuit said it isn’t enough because parents can’t restrict teens from sending private messages and children can create accounts without their parents’ knowledge.
The plaintiffs’ counsel also tested Snap’s “Quick Add” feature in 2023 and found that many of the usernames “generated by Snap’s recommendation algorithm appeared on their face to belong to predatory users,” the lawsuit said.
Valentin-Rios was also able to create a second Snapchat account with the username “Nocits21g” to connect with J.F. and to conceal the activity from his girlfriend, according to the lawsuit.
The rape victim, who was diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression, started to engage in self-harm and expressed suicidal thoughts, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and financial damages for the harm allegedly caused by the company to the family.
“J.F. feels embarrassed and ashamed, but she is also angry that Snap facilitated this by design, and angrier still that Snap continues to operate its platform in the same manner today,” the lawsuit said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Thursday to crack down on inflated profits stemming from car crash lawsuits, blessing a hard-fought compromise between Uber and the state’s trial attorneys that averts a November showdown between two of California’s most powerful and moneyed lobbying forces.
The deal, the fruit of months of negotiations, takes aim at the lucrative way doctors can charge for procedures on patients referred to them by personal injury lawyers.
If a law firm has a client who was hurt in a car accident, the lawyer will often send them to a doctor who will perform surgery on a “lien” basis, meaning the doctor will be paid from money that comes from a lawsuit settlement rather than through insurance.
Uber contends this arrangement has created an incentive for doctors and attorneys to collude to dramatically inflate medical bills. The more expensive the bill, they say, the bigger the resulting payout.
The law, SB 623, caps how much these doctors can charge when their patient is involved in a lawsuit against a ride-share company, which are frequent targets of litigation due to their top-of-the-line insurance policies. The new law will also require Uber to ramp up background checks of its drivers.
“We’re going to have a much safer state both for medical patients and passengers in Ubers,” said Nicholas Rowley, a prominent Texas attorney who helped bankroll the fight and took a leading role in the negotiations.
The law only applies to cases that involve ride-share accidents that take place after Jan. 1, 2027.
“This legislation puts meaningful guardrails in place to better protect accident victims, increase transparency and accountability in the medical lien system and strengthen safety,” said Ramona Prieto, Uber’s head of public policy for the Western U.S., in a statement.
For months, Uber and lawyers from across the state poured tens of millions into dueling ballot measures that threatened to devastate the profits of whichever side lost.
Uber fired the first shot with a ballot measure that sought to cap how much attorneys can earn in lawsuits involving auto accidents. The company argued attorneys were swindling their own clients, inflating medical bills of car crash victims to increase the value of the settlement and then pocketing a hefty chunk of the payouts.
The state’s trial attorneys countered that the fee cap would make small or difficult cases a money-losing endeavor and block scores of accident victims from the courts. They shot back with their own ballot measure that would increase legal liability for ride-share companies if a passenger or driver is sexually assaulted while on a ride, seizing on investigative reporting that highlighted assaults in Ubers.
“They were waiting for us to blink and we didn’t,” said Douglas Saeltzer, the head of the Consumer Attorneys of California, the lawyer trade group that pushed for the measure against Uber. “Their starting place, I don’t believe, was in the interest of protecting victims — it was in the interest of protecting Uber.”
With the passage of Thursday’s law, both sides have agreed to pull their respective measures from the November ballot, halting campaigns that had both parties amassing tens of millions in funding and blanketing the airwaves with ads.
“Now we can stop seeing all the commercials,” said Assemblymember Blanca Pancheo (D-Downey) at a Tuesday hearing.
The law, put forward by Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) and Sen. Thomas Umberg (D-Santa Ana), also caps the amount that can be earned by third-party investors who buy out a doctor’s lien in a personal injury case. These companies will purchase a doctor’s stake in the case at a reduced rate, then pocket a share of the payout if the case settles.
“Private equity and hedge funds buy them at a steep discount, then turn around and collect the full inflated amount,” Saeltzer said at a Tuesday hearing on the bill. “That’s money flowing to Wall Street investors, not patients.”
The law will require annual background checks for ride-share drivers and expand the list of offenses that disqualify someone from the job.
In addition to the ballot battle, has Uber sued two of LA’s most well-known personal injury firms — the Law Offices of Jacob Emrani and Downtown L.A. Law Group — accusing them of inflating medical bills and forcing clients to undergo needless and expensive surgeries to inflate the value of the claim. The firms asked the judge to dismiss the case Wednesday, arguing Uber had failed to prove fraud. Both firms have vehemently denied wrongdoing.
The lawsuit, filed last year, has put the plaintiff lawyers in the unusual position of playing defense. Listening in the audience at Wednesday’s hearings were the partners of Downtown L.A. Law Group and Jacob Emrani.
“Let’s be clear about what this Uber case really is,” said John Hueston, outside counsel for Emrani. “It’s brought by a $150 billion dollar company … to intimidate the plaintiff’s bar, exhaust its resources and chill the suits that hold Uber accountable.”
Michael Huston, one of the lawyers who represents Uber, countered that the case is “not an attack on the plaintiff’s bar.”
“We have brought suit against the two in this state … that are engaged in naked fraud,” he said.
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