The First Partner’s gender agenda undercuts ordinary families

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OPINION – In a resurfaced video circulating on social media, California’s First Partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, laid out her governing philosophy on gender with the cheerful self-assurance that only comes from living inside a very expensive ideological bubble.

Speaking at the Common Sense Summit on Kids and Families, she described giving her sons dolls and systematically replacing male characters with female ones in their bedtime stories. She called the moment we are living through one where humanity is “ultimately deconstructing all these gender roles.”

She found this exciting. Many Californians picking up the tab for her office found it something else entirely.

A second clip showed her expressing alarm that boys who spend time online are “moving to the Right.” Her proposed remedy was not to examine why progressive messaging fails to resonate with young men. The remedy was legislation.

Her husband’s administration, she noted, was already working on bills to hold tech companies accountable – code, in context, for making sure boys encounter fewer competing ideas online.

This is the logical end point of the progressive project on gender: when the message fails to persuade, reach for the regulatory apparatus.

Siebel Newsom holds no elected position. She won no race, filed no candidacy papers and faces no voters. Yet she operates from a state office staffed by seven government employees, with salaries ranging from $72,000 to $206,000 annually, funded by California taxpayers.

The office has produced gender equity summits, school-facing initiatives, and advocacy campaigns that flow directly into the classroom. Parents who object are told they are resisting equity. Taxpayers who fund it are never consulted.

Before becoming First Partner, she founded The Representation Project, a nonprofit that uses film and media to challenge “limiting gender stereotypes.” Her state office promotes identical themes. The arrangement creates a closed loop – ideology developed in the nonprofit world, amplified through a publicly funded platform, deployed into schools the governor’s budget controls.

In the private wealth management world where I have spent more than 30 years, we call this a major conflict of interest. We also call it a self-dealing structure when the person setting the agenda benefits from the apparatus enforcing it.

California follows the national fertility decline with rates at historic lows. The CDC’s 2024 birth data tell a story no progressive framing spins favorably: the total fertility rate fell to 1.599 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement threshold.

A society that cannot replace itself does not stagnate, it contracts. Social programs become unfundable. The tax base shrinks. Pension systems collapse under the weight of too many retirees supported by too few workers.

A culture that has spent decades treating motherhood as a second-tier ambition and boyhood as a pathology to be corrected is not a neutral bystander to that decline.

Siebel Newsom presents herself as a champion of the ordinary family. She speaks from a $9 million Marin County estate, sends her children to private schools and employs state-funded staff to advance an agenda reaching the public schools the rest of California’s families are required to use.

The gap between that lived reality and her stated mission is not subtle. When her own household produced a son curious about an online figure she found alarming, her first instinct was legislation. Not dinner-table conversation. Not parental authority. Legislation.

The answer for Californians is action at the level where it actually matters. Demand school choice so education dollars follow the child rather than the ideological program.

Support candidates who understand that an office created to advance one spouse’s nonprofit agenda is not a constitutional function of state government – and who will defund it, redirecting those resources to infrastructure, tax relief or programs that actually improve families’ daily lives.

Back tax and benefits structures that make parenthood economically viable and treat a parent who chooses to stay home as performing legitimate social work, not as a rounding error on a policy agenda.

Californians who trust observable evidence over elite theory hold both the right and the responsibility to resist this agenda, before another generation absorbs the lesson that the family arrangements that built Western civilization were the problem all along.

They were not the problem. They were the solution. And they still are.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience.