California, Florida headed for ‘crash collision’ over custody of transgender children

Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 254 into law, putting family courts in the Sunshine State “on a crash collision” with their counterparts in California, according to Los Angeles area family law attorney Alphonse Provinziano.

The Florida law targets the transgender community in several ways: It criminalizes medical providers gender-affirming treatment for minors, places heavy restrictions on adults seeking such care and grants family law courts “temporary emergency jurisdiction” to remove a minor from the custody of a parent in the event that that minor is receiving gender-affirming treatment.

It’s that latter provision that is causing Provinziano the most concern, as it runs counter to California law Senate Bill 107, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, which requires California family courts to assert jurisdiction in the event that a transgender child is seeking gender-affirming care in the state.

“The two laws are diametrically opposed,” Provinziano told The Bee.

Normally, when two courts in different states are determining jurisdiction in a custody case, “there’s a process where the courts are supposed to resolve jurisdictional issues. One court has to give way to another court,” Provinziano said.

But since both California and Florida law require their respective courts to assert jurisdiction in this case, neither can give way, he said.

What it means is that if a parent in California and a parent in Florida share a transgender child, and they disagree over whether the child should receive affirming care, there’s no legal way to resolve this dispute, Provinziano said.

“You can’t give up jurisdiction in California if the other state limits gender-affirming care,” he said.

While SB 254 is almost certain to draw legal challenge, Provinziano said the matter may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the meantime, the state where the transgender child resides is likely to control whether the child stays or leaves the state, the attorney said.

This conflict between California and Florida could be a matter of life and death.

A 2022 study published in the National Library of Medicine said that 82% of transgender individuals “have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth,”

.People who received gender-affirming treatment “had substantially lower prevalence of past-year suicide thoughts and attempts than those who wanted hormone therapy and surgical care and did not receive them,” according to a 2019 study from the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute.

Gender-affirming treatment is endorsed by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association.