Those are some of the stories that California lawmakers are citing as they advance two plans to change the ticketing landscape. One caps the extent to which resellers can mark up the original ticket price while the other prohibits resellers from selling tickets they don’t yet own. 

Democratic Assemblymembers Issac Bryan of Culver City and Matt Haney of San Francisco are each carrying bills that they say would protect consumers from fraudulent and deceptive ticket sales. 

Both measures are backed by the ticket market’s dominant seller, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. Its support has some worried that the bills will help the company crush its competitors and jack up prices. A federal jury in New York this week found that the company illegally acted as a monopoly in a victory for, among others, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who with colleagues in other states sued the company two years ago and kept going after federal prosecutors settled. Live Nation is now awaiting penalties.

Despite these headwinds, the ticket bills are sailing through the Legislature.

Supporters say the legislation has nothing to do with the antitrust case against Live Nation and helps consumers. Opponents disagree.

“The state Legislature should really be standing up for consumers instead of advancing bills that are there to help a monopoly that has been caught on record calling its fans stupid and has bragged about robbing them blind,” said Jose Barrera, national vice president for the far west region at the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights advocacy group. 

Ticketmaster’s competitors in the online resale market are lobbying against the measures, a sign that they view the proposals as a threat to their business. 

Jack Sterne, StubHub’s head of policy communications, wrote to CalMatters, stating, “Passing laws that hand the Ticketmaster monopoly more power and don’t actually make tickets more affordable is the last thing California’s leaders should do.”

But Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, which is co-sponsoring the bills, argues that they will regulate the marketplace to better protect fans by limiting price gouging and encouraging the face value — or below face value — exchange of tickets. 

“Ultimately, that is what these bills will do, in addition to making sure that the tickets are actually real,” he said. “That is a good thing for California consumers. It’s a good thing for artists and it’s a good thing for these small businesses and nonprofits that make up the independent stages across the state.”

A Live Nation spokesperson said in a statement to CalMatters, “The resale lobby constantly tries to change the subject by pointing fingers at Ticketmaster, even though it has less than 25% of the resale market. This has nothing to do with anyone’s monopoly, but rather is about protecting fans from scalpers and the resale sites that cater to them.”

The company has spent roughly $165,000 on lobbying efforts this legislative session, including to support Bryan’s bill. 

‘Unlikely allies’

Bryan’s Assembly Bill 1349 would ban the sale of speculative tickets — or tickets that are not in the possession or ownership of the people who list them online. In an April hearing, Bryan said the bill protects consumers from predatory mark ups.

“This bill is so important that, after our introduction, it brought unlikely allies together,” Bryan said, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. “In fact, this bill brought the Giants and the Dodgers together, brought the National Independent Venue Association and Live Nation together. ​​It brought Kendrick Lamar and Kid Rock together. It brought Isaac Bryan and Donald Trump together.”

Several secondary ticket sellers are fighting the measure, including StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats. The three companies have spent roughly $1.1 million dollars on lobbying efforts this legislative session, which included opposition to Bryan’s bill. 

Opponents including Robert Herrell, executive director for the Consumer Federation of California, argue that the bill strengthens Live Nation Ticketmaster’s grip on the ticketing and live entertainment industry. According to them, the measure would give Live Nation complete control over the ticket even after it has been purchased — meaning, for example, that consumers could lose the ability to sell it or give it away.

“There’s no consumer choice in the matter,” said Herrell. “They can keep people out of shows if they want to. There have been situations where, if you bought a ticket on the secondary market, you’ve been denied entry into a show.” 

Proponents say Herrell and other opponents are mistaken. They say they are not trying to prevent transferability but rather, they want to protect fans from speculative costs.

“We want those rooms full,” said Ron Gubitz, executive director of Music Artists Coalition, which is co-sponsoring both bills. “So you have to be able to transfer a ticket. We just want it to be in a way that’s safe, trustworthy and not creating this run on the market that exists now.”

Gubitz pointed to a recent Bruno Mars concert, where tickets were on StubHub for $400 to $2,000 before they were on sale through Ticketmaster.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “That’s a speculative ticket that Bryan’s bill is trying to stop. That shouldn’t happen. It’s not fair to anybody, except for the secondary (market). It seems great for them.”

Price caps in a free market

Haney’s Assembly Bill 1720, also known as the California Fans First Act, would put a 10% cap on resale event ticket markups, inclusive of the ticket fees. In other words, a reseller could not charge more than 10% higher than the original ticket price.

In an interview with CalMatters, Haney said artists, independent venues and downtowns are currently being “screwed over and exploited” by scalpers and brokers.

“We can’t allow the status quo to continue if we want to ensure Californians have access to affordable tickets to see their favorite artists or if we want independent venues or the broader landscape of musicians and artists to thrive in our state,” he said.

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Assemblymember Corey Jackson, D-Moreno Valley, has reintroduced legislation to lay the groundwork for EV manufacturing and job training in the Inland Empire.

In a phone interview, Jackson said there’s going to be strong demand in the coming years for EVs in California. A 2020 executive order signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom requires zero-emission vehicles to make up 100% of in-state sales of passenger cars by 2035.

“These are still jobs where you don’t need a college degree and you can receive training to be able to either help be a part of the building of electric vehicles, electric batteries and all of the things that go into it,” Jackson said.

Unlike California’s coastal counties, many Inland residents lack college educations. Diversifying the Inland economy is a top priority for many elected leaders in a region dominated by logistics — an industry expected to lose jobs to automation in the years ahead.

AB 72 would create an Electric Vehicle Economic Opportunity Zone in Riverside County “for the purpose of creating programs to make electric vehicle manufacturing jobs and education more accessible to lower income communities,” the bill’s text states.

California’s Labor & Workforce Development Agency would work with schools, EV makers and banks  “to develop … education, training and investment programs” in the zone, the bill read.

Riverside County would work with the state to map the zone’s boundaries, according to the bill. AB 72 would cost the state $5.8 million to start and $1.2 million a year going forward, according to a state analysis of the bill.

AB 72 is similar to AB 2448, which passed the legislature in 2024. Citing “cost pressures” to the state budget, Newsom vetoed the 2024 bill.

Jackson, whose district includes Perris, Moreno Valley, and parts of Riverside, San Jacinto and Hemet, hopes it’s different this time around.

“I know what it’s going to take, and I’m going to have to work on it to get the money necessary into the budget,” Jackson said.

Newsom, the assemblymember said, “only vetoed (the 2024 bill) because the money wasn’t already approved in the budget for it, and as a member of the budget committee and a leader in the budget committee, I’m going to work my butt off to try to get that done.”

Jackson sees parallels between his bill and how Hollywood and Silicon Valley, respectively, became dominant in the entertainment and technology sectors.

“Silicon Valley didn’t become Silicon Valley on its own. Hollywood did not become Hollywood on its own,” he said. “The state purposely invested dollars and incentives for those industries to take root and thrive.”

“The Inland Empire, it’s our turn to get those targeted investments. And our friends, families and neighbors need higher-paying jobs closer to where they live.”

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What is Assembly Bill 867?

Introduced by Assemblymember Alex Lee, AB 867 bans cats from being declawed across California. The bill was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on Oct. 9 this year and marked a historic milestone for animal welfare organizations and advocates. 

Lee’s office said that veterinarians overwhelmingly oppose cat declawing when it is not medically necessary. Cat declawing involves amputating the cat’s toe bones or severing the tendons controlling their paws. It is a surgical procedure that could lead to debilitating health effects and increase the chances of cats developing behaviors such as biting, aggression and litter box avoidance.

Sponsored by The Paw Project, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Humane World for Animals, and Humane Veterinary Medical Alliance, California now joins a growing number of states, including New York, Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Massachusetts, to ban this practice.

Why is Assembly Bill 867 needed?

Unless medically needed, AB 867 prevents unnecessary procedures. According to Dr. Jennifer Conrad, Founder and Director of The Paw Project, an organization that has been working to end declawing for over 25 years through education and legislation, this procedure has been proven to harm cats and provides no benefits to people. 

“Declawing isn’t a manicure – it’s an amputation that needlessly harms cats to spare sofas,” said Jennifer Hauge, Senior Legislative Affairs Manager at Animal Legal Defense Fund, in a press release.

According to a study published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, cited by Lee’s office, declawing is associated with numerous long-term effects, including overgrooming, chronic back pain, residual bone fragments and mobility issues. As scratching is considered a natural cat behavior, people can turn to non-surgical alternatives such as nail trimming, soft claw caps, and behavioral training to address unwanted behaviors, rather than leaning towards this surgical procedure. 

More information on Assembly Bill 867 can be found here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB867

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Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Monday that bans streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu from playing advertisements substantially louder than the programming they accompany.

Newsom signs hundreds of bills each year with little fanfare, reserving bill-signing announcements typically for only the measures that he and his team find the most noteworthy or in which the governor is personally invested. 

He sent one out announcing he’d signed Senate Bill 576.

“We heard Californians loud and clear, and what’s clear is that they don’t want commercials at a volume any louder than the level at which they were previously enjoying a program,” Newsom wrote. “By signing SB 576, California is dialing down this inconvenience across streaming platforms.”

The law makes streaming platforms comply with the same standards as a 15-year-old federal law that limits how loud television and cable broadcasters can make their advertisements.

President Barack Obama signed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act in 2010, which gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to issue rules ensuring that the average volume of TV commercials does not exceed the volume of the shows they accompany. 

Streaming services were still nascent at the time. Members of Congress have since tried to add streaming platforms to the law, but two 2023 federal bills didn’t get hearings.

Lawmakers don’t like loud ads

The bill wasn’t a tough sell for its author, Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana. It passed the Legislature with none of California’s 120 legislators voting against it. 

Umberg told CalMatters this summer that he came up with the idea for the bill after his legislative director, Zach Keller, told him about how a loud ad woke up his infant daughter, Samantha Rose, while the adults were trying to relax and watch a show.

“This bill was inspired by baby Samantha and every exhausted parent who’s finally gotten a baby to sleep, only to have a blaring streaming ad undo all that hard work,” Umberg said in a statement accompanying Newsom’s. “SB 576 brings some much-needed peace and quiet to California households by making sure streaming ads aren’t louder than the shows we actually want to watch.”

The measure faced opposition from California’s influential entertainment industry, including the Motion Picture Association of America, which has donated at least $204,000 to lawmakers since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

The opponents argued that the measure would be difficult to implement since streaming services don’t have the same control over ad volumes as traditional broadcasters.

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Montalvo was able to obtain the benefit after signing a contract with a private company that compiles medical evidence to help veterans establish disability claims. The process worked, and Montalvo began receiving the money some 52 years after he left the Army with a bad knee. 

But there was a catch. His contract with Trajector Medical required him to pay five times the value of his new monthly benefit almost right away. That was $5,500 he didn’t have. 

“They wanted to collect all of it, and I told them how am I going to give you money I don’t have?” he said. 

For the second year in a row, California lawmakers are on the brink of banning fees for the kind of service Montalvo received. 

Critics of the paid services say the practice already is illegal under a federal law that says only accredited officers can help veterans file those claims, and that claims representatives can be paid only under specific circumstances. And, they note that veterans can get the same assistance for free from county veteran service offices, as well as from several veterans organizations that have long been accredited with the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

But the law banning paid services lost its teeth after a 2006 overhaul removed criminal penalties for violations,helping to spawn a burgeoning for-profit industry that now caters to veterans who want help with the VA’s notoriously slow claims process. 

That’s an affront to many former military service members who view the charges as a violation of the compact the nation makes with those who serve. Several of the companies have fee formulas similar to what Montalvo paid. That could result in a charge of $20,000 depending on the veteran’s disability rating. 

“We shouldn’t be charging veterans outrageous amounts of money to access their benefits, benefits they earned through their service,” said Sen. Bob Archuleta, a Democrat from Norwalk who sponsored Senate Bill 694 to ban unaccredited companies from assisting California veterans with disability claims. 

His bill is awaiting a final vote in the Assembly after clearing the Senate and several legislative committees by overwhelming majorities. Its supporters, however, are not yet celebrating. A similar measure died last year late in the legislative process without a vote in an appropriations committee. One of the larger veterans’ claims companies also is making a concerted push to defend its business as a legitimate alternative to free services.

“We are serving veterans. Yes, we’re doing it as a business but just because we’re doing it as a business doesn’t mean we’re not providing an essential service,” said Bill Taylor, a former Army officer who is the cofounder of Veterans Guardian.

He became the face of the industry over the last four years as first Congress and then state legislatures took up bills to prohibit unaccredited veterans claims services. His company contributed $1.4 million to members of Congress and spent $1.9 million on federal lobbying in 2023 and 2024, according to the campaign finance website Open Secrets. In California this year, his company and another spent $235,000 on lobbying against Archuleta’s bill, according to the website California Lobby Search. 

“Maybe we were the only ones who recognized the existential threat to the industry.

I don’t have a choice; I have to be here,” Taylor said in an interview with CalMatters during a recent visit to Sacramento.

The result is something of a stalemate. Congress has neither passed legislation to reinstate criminal penalties for unaccredited veterans claims services nor passed a competing bill that would permit the companies to operate.

States adopt different policies

States are moving in different directions, too. Maine, New Jersey and New York passed laws to ban the for-profit consultants, while Louisiana passed a law to allow them, according to the news organization Stateline. 

Taylor is urging lawmakers enact policies that would regulate the claims industry, such as by capping fees and prohibiting misleading advertising. He noted that his company has no shortage of clients, and the people often turn to it out of frustration with the VA or with free claims services. 

But Archuleta and the veterans groups supporting his proposal say it’s impossible to distinguish bad actors from responsible ones. They want California to step in with a state policy until Congress resolves whether the for-profit claims consultants can gain accreditation and be regulated by the federal government. 

“The point is here you should never take money from the veteran. That is absolutely scandalous that that is permitted,” William Swenson, a Medal of Honor recipient from the Afghanistan War who recently visited Sacramento to meet with lawmakers in support of Archuleta’s bill, told CalMatters. He now is working for a company that is developing a different approach to helping veterans with their claims.

Veterans unprepared for fee

Montalvo, 72, of Lamont was able to work out a payment plan with Trajector. It includes a small interest fee. He said he had his knee checked when he left the Army in 1973, but it didn’t result in a disability rating. 

He said Trajector reached out to him by a text message and a phone call, and he replied thinking it was worth a shot. Today, his monthly disability check helps with groceries, although he’s sending more than half of it to Trajector and he pays off his bill.

John Ryan, 68, had a similar experience with Trajector. “They were really polite and I was under the influence that they worked with the VA, as soon as I got the impression I felt relaxed. They asked me questions and they moved pretty fast. I was surprised they got results so fast,” he said.

His claim resulted in $171 monthly disability payment for hearing loss stemming his service in the Marines. He said he also was unprepared to pay Trajector’s full fee right away, although he has paid it off. 

Trajector spokesperson Steven Zenofsky said the company strives to make its fee structure clear to veterans before working with them. Like Taylor’s Veterans Guardian, Trajector also was co-founded by a veteran and its leaders view themselves as helping former military service members navigate a confusing process.

If a veteran receives $1,000 a month after working with a claims consultant, Zenofsky said, “That’s $1,000 a month tax free. From that perspective, many of our clients would say ‘The fee was for a valuable service provided that I wouldn’t normally get on my own, and for life.’” 

Sen. Archuleta wants to steer more resources to California’s county veteran service officers, who are accredited to work on VA claims and can help direct veterans to a wide range of services in addition to disability payments. 

David West, who served in the Marine Corps and is a Nevada County veterans services officer, has been an outspoken advocate for the bill. He was once homeless, and he said at one point in his life he would have signed a contract with a for-profit claims consultant. 

He would have regretted it, he said. 

“That’s not what my recruiter promised me,” he said “You’re 19. You come in, we’ll take care of you and you’ll never have to pay a thing.”

“We can’t allow for this middleman to show up and break that promise,” he said. 

The post Will California ban companies from charging vets to secure benefits? Some say it should appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

In February, Assemblymember James Ramos, D-San Bernardino, introduced Assembly Bill 440, which would require the state to identify the state-controlled bridges and roadways with the most suicides and the most attempted suicides and report back to the Legislature on potential strategies to reduce deaths by the end of 2027.

“We need to be proactive to ensure we provide at-risk individuals with the help they need,” Ramos is quoted as saying in a news release issued by his office. “Creating strategies that build in time to reconsider fatal choices can save lives and prevent long lasting traumatic pain in families and communities.”

The bill passed the Assembly on a 79-0 vote June 2 and moved on to the state Senate.

On Thursday, June 26, the bill advanced out of the Senate’s Committee on Health by an 11-0 vote.

AB 440 is headed next to the state Senate’s Appropriations Committee.

Ramos’ bill comes after a fall in which two Rancho Cucamonga teenagers killed themselves on the 210 Freeway at the Haven Avenue overpass, in mid- and late September.

According to Jennifer Camacho-Curtis, spokesperson for the city of Rancho Cucamonga, it had been at least a decade since the last suicides at the spot. Since then, the city has met with Caltrans officials several times to push for stronger suicide deterrents at the Haven Avenue overpass, Camacho-Curtis wrote in an email on Friday, June 27.

“While we’ve faced challenges  and have been met with resistance in securing Caltrans’ approval for substantial improvements such as overhanging fencing, we are continuing those discussions with urgency and focus,” she wrote.

In late fall 2024, Camacho-Curtis said, the city worked with San Bernardino County to install two suicide prevention signs at the Haven Avenue overpass. More recently, the city has been working to secure permits for the installation of overpass wing fencing at Haven Avenue.

“The city is funding this improvement directly,” Camacho-Curtis said, “as a demonstration of our commitment to proactive, local action.”

Suicide is a not a new subject for Ramos to tackle. He helped create the state’s Office of Suicide Prevention in 2020 and has continued to advocate for suicide prevention, especially in the Native American community, since then.

Ramos is not the only local legislator responding to the Rancho Cucamonga teens’ deaths.

Earlier in June, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus advocated support for Senate Bill 800. The bill, introduced by state Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-Colton, and sponsored by the city of Rancho Cucamonga, would install physical barriers and signage to discourage suicide at 10 Freeway overpasses in San Bernardino County, prioritizing those with the highest rate of documented suicides over the past 20 years. SB 800 was approved by the state Senate on June 4 by a vote of 39-0 and is now working its way through the Assembly.

“In the past eight months, deputies have responded to 24 calls for service at seven different freeway overpasses throughout the city of Rancho Cucamonga. During that time, there have been at least ten separate incidents involving individuals either falling or attempting to fall from freeway overpasses in Rancho Cucamonga,” Dicus wrote in an op-ed. “Tragically, four lives were lost including one in the past week involving a 14-year-old who recently graduated the 8th grade. In six other cases, deputies intervened just in time – preventing additional loss of life.”

His department has also answered similar calls in Apple Valley, Colton, Ontario and Redlands, he wrote.

“Our job as law enforcement is to respond – but also to prevent where we can,” Dicus’ op-ed concludes. “SB 800 represents a chance to do both.”

According to the Assembly Committee on Health’s analysis of AB 440, suicide is the No. 1 cause of violent death and self-harm is the third leading cause of injury-related visits to emergency rooms.

How to get help

If you or someone you know is considering suicide or self-harm, mental health resources are available, including free and low-cost services. They include:

• The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988, or visit SuicidePreventionLifeline.org
• Crisis Text Line: CrisisTextLine.org
• Know the Signs: SuicideIsPreventable.org
• The Suicide Prevention Resource Center’s Resources and Programs page: SPRC.org/resources-programs
• The Veterans Crisis Line: Call 988 and press 1, or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net
• The National Council for Behavioral Health’s Find a Behavioral Health Provider page: TheNationalCouncil.org/providers/?region=CA
• Born This Way Foundation’s Get Help Now page: BornThisWay.foundation/get-help-now
• Hayden’s Corner: HaydensCorner.org

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The legislation would also require officers “to be identifiable via their uniform, whether with name or other identifier,” according to Democratic Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Jesse Arreguin of Berkeley, who introduced Senate Bill 627, also known as the “No Secret Police Act.”

The bill would prohibit local, state and federal law enforcement officers, or any person acting on behalf of a law enforcement agency from covering their faces. The measure includes exceptions for SWAT teams, medical-grade masks such as surgical or N95 masks, and masks designed to protect against smoke during a wildfire-related state of emergency.

Wiener said the legislation was prompted by the Trump administration’s recent immigration crackdown and reports of federal agents wearing masks and allegedly not identifying themselves during operations.

“People are afraid, families are being torn apart,” the senator said at a news conference in San Francisco on Monday. “And it’s important that anyone who is engaged in law enforcement activity whether state, county or whether its federal that there’s full transparency in terms of what happening.”

The lawmakers said they believed the measure would improve public trust in law enforcement.

“This law is rooted in two principles. One, to protect the safety of California’s communities. And two, to ensure that there is transparency and accountability for law enforcement,” Arreguin said.

In an interview with Margaret Brennan of “Face the Nation” on June 8, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem has defended law enforcement covering their faces.

“It’s for the safety of those individuals or the work that they’re doing as far as protecting their identity so they can continue to do investigative work,” Noem said.

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The bill, AB 839, was initially introduced in February. Following its passage in the Assembly, the bill was transferred to the California Senate, where it is currently under review by the Committee on Environmental Quality and the Committee on Judiciary. 

If signed into law, the legislation would provide for expedited California Environmental Quality Act review for up to three SAF projects that do not use fossil fuels in the production process and meet specified environmental and labor requirements. 

CEQA, signed into law in 1970, established statewide regulations for the environmental review of discretionary projects and a process for mitigating or avoiding potential environmental impacts. The review process aims to inform the public, local agencies and decision makers about the potential environmental impacts associated with certain planning approvals. 

Separate bills signed into law in 2021 and 2023 allow the California Governors Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation to certify eligible infrastructure projects to benefit from expedited judicial review of lawsuits challenging the projects under CEQA. According to the office, the certification can reduce lawsuit-related delays from 3-5 years to approximately 270 days. Certified projects may also have improved access to financing and be more competitive for federal funding. AB 839 would allow up to three SAF projects to qualify for this expedited judicial review as “infrastructure projects.” 

The bill defines SAF projects to include projects to manufacture, process, store, distribute or transport SAF or feedstock used for the production of SAF. If the project involves the conversion or replacement of an existing major source of air pollution, such as a refinery, the project must reduce emissions of air pollutants compared to the baseline environmental conditions in the vicinity of the project. Projects that do not involve the conversion or replacement of an existing major source of air pollution must not cause a significant effect on the environment attributable to any air pollutant. 

A full copy of the bill is available on the California State Assembly website.

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California led the nation nearly 80 years ago in establishing regulations to protect child actors from financial abuse, but those regulations needed updating, Newsom said. The existing law covers children working in film and television, but does not extend to minors who make a name for themselves on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Family vlogs, where influencers share details of their daily lives with many strangers online, have become a popular and lucrative way to make money.

Family vlogs today share intimate details of children’s lives – toilet training, illnesses, bad behavior, new experiences – for strangers to see. Experts say this can cause great harm to children.

California’s measures apply to all children under 18. They received broad and unopposed support and require parents and guardians who monetize their children’s online presence to establish a trust fund for their children.

Parents will have to keep records of the minutes their children appear in their online content and how much money they earn from those posts, among other things. The laws give child influencers a percentage of revenue based on how often they appear on blogs, videos or online content that generates at least 10 cents per view. Children can sue their parents for failing to comply.

Children who work as content creators on platforms like YouTube will also have at least 15% of their earnings deposited into a trust fund until they turn 18.

The new laws will come into effect next year.

The new laws protecting underage influencers are part of Newsom’s ongoing efforts to address the mental health impacts of social media, especially when used by children.

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Congressional Republicans were on the same page; on Tuesday they passed a bill to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports at the elementary through college level, which would jeopardize federal funding for schools that don’t comply.

Sanchez says her bill and other legislation like it would assure a safe, fair playing field for girls.  

“There is a definite difference between biological boys and females in sports, especially at this age,” said Sanchez, a Rancho Santa Margarita Republican who represents Temecula and Murrieta. “This is the intent of the bill, to protect the integrity and fairness of girls’ sports.”

Civil rights and LGBTQ advocates argue that the bill would turn civil rights protections against vulnerable students. Kel O’Hara, an attorney with Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based gender justice organization, said more than half the states have passed restrictions on transgender students’ participation in sports. Those bills target “a problem that doesn’t exist,” they said.

Sanchez’s bill likely faces steep odds in the California Legislature, which is dominated by Democrats who often vote to the left of Congress. “It strikes me as exceptionally unlikely that such a bill would pass” in California, said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, said in an email.

California in recent years has passed legislation supporting trans students and athletes, including several measures that protect people from discrimination regardless of gender status.

About 3.3% of high school students identified as transgender in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only a small number of students of any gender are elite athletes.

“It’s a dog whistle from our perspective,” O’Hara said. “There’s no evidence that trans students, particularly trans girls, are dominating girls’ sports.”

Sanchez pointed to a lawsuit that two female students in Riverside Unified School District filed in November, alleging that a trans girl had displaced them from the cross-country team. The lawsuit argued that the transgender teammate received a top spot in competitions because of faster times, knocking the plaintiffs out of key parts of a cross-country meet. Sanchez said that’s evidence that transgender girls hold an edge over their teammates.

“I think when you look at it from the perspective and lens of biology, males have a very clear and undeniable advantage, so that plays into part of the legislation we’re trying to advance now,” she said.

O’Hara disputed that transgender girls outperform their teammates. They said that benefits of high school sports extend beyond athletic competition, so trans girls who are banned from teams also lose opportunities to develop teamwork, leadership skills and a sense of community.

“These bills try to convince queer and trans young people that they don’t belong and they’re not safe,” they said. “They want students to give up hope and go home.” 

Pushback against transgender rights, particularly in schools, has become a conservative call to arms. More than a dozen red states have sued the Biden administration over changes to the federal education rights law, Title IX, which extended its discrimination protections to LGBTQ students. On Thursday a federal judge in Kentucky ruled in the states’ favor, striking down the new rules.

In the fall, several college teams garnered national attention when they forfeited their games against a San José  State University women’s volleyball team because of its transgender athlete.

President-elect Donald Trump suggested at campaign rallies that he would “keep men out of women’s sports” using executive power to implement a ban.

Sanchez thinks the American public is moving in that direction. She pointed to a 2023 Gallup poll showing that 69% of Americans think transgender athletes should not be allowed to play on teams that match their gender identity, up 7 percentage points from Americans’ views on the matter in 2021. 

Not surprisingly, opinions varied along party lines. The poll found 86% of Republicans opposed  transgender athletes playing on teams aligned with their identity, while Democrats were split nearly evenly.  

About 40% of voters in Sanchez’ district are Republican, 30% Democratic, with the rest registered with third parties or citing no party preference. Sanchez said her office has received calls in support of the bill.

Last year Sanchez passed other successful education bills, including one to protect student athletes from severe heat conditions and another to make epinephrine injectors available at schools. Both passed with nearly unanimous bipartisan support.

This bill will likely be different. Assemblymember Chris Ward, a San Diego Democrat and chair of the Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, said members “will not stand by as anyone attempts to use kids as political pawns.

“Participating in sports leads to better outcomes in academics and mental health,” he said in a statement, “and transgender kids — like any student — deserve the chance to benefit from all that sports have to offer, in an environment that both affirms and validates their gender identity.”

Carl DeMaio, a freshman Republican Assembly member from San Diego, said he’s co-sponsoring the bill, which he thinks maintains “dignity, respect and fairness” for all players. DeMaio, who is gay, said other members of the LGBTQ community have told him they don’t believe transgender females should compete on girls’ teams, and he compared the policy to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. 

“If you allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports, you are not maintaining fairness and you are robbing these girls of their dreams,” DeMaio said. 

Sanchez said she’s committed to her legislation and expects that it will align with upcoming federal policies on transgender rights, including Tuesday’s House bill.

O’Hara argued that protecting female athletes doesn’t have to come at the expense of transgender girls.

“Why does protecting some students have to mean discriminating against others?” they asked. “Why are we approaching civil rights laws as a zero-sum game?”

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