The Brief

In much of the country, a six-figure salary is a benchmark for success. That sixth digit tends to symbolize professional achievement and a degree of financial security.

But in Orange County, individuals earning up to $104,200 now qualify as “low income.”

California’s Department of Housing and Community Development released its official state income limits for 2026 on May 29. These thresholds determine who is eligible for income-restricted apartments and other housing assistance programs.

Under the new limits, one-person households in Orange County earning $104,200 per year or less qualify for low-income housing. Last year, the cut-off was $94,750.

“It just feels so crazy to me,” said Megan Junanto, a 23-year-old actuary living in Irvine. She recently received a raise putting her above the low-income threshold. But last year, she would have qualified.

“I felt like one of the most well off compared to people in my age group, and I am near low income, and last year I was low income,” Junanto said.

Housing policy experts say the ever-rising goalposts for financial stability make it hard for Orange County to retain teachers, nurses and other middle-income workers, who are needed to make a local economy function.

Despite earning relatively high incomes, some young residents feel they need to give up on the idea of buying a home in Orange County.

Junanto is able to rent an apartment with her boyfriend. But she said homeownership feels out of reach. Her immigrant parents bought a house in Garden Grove in the early 2000s on her father’s wages alone, she said. Now, the same home would cost at least $1 million.

“Those jokes about how you should have bought a house as a fetus, that definitely resonates,” Junanto said. “How hard do we have to work in order to attain that?”

High-income workers still far from achieving homeownership

According to a recent report from the California Association of Realtors, only about 16% of Orange County households earn the minimum annual income of $350,400 needed to afford the region’s median home price of $1,442,930.

Advocates for increased housing production blame local elected leaders for failing to address the region’s affordability crisis.

“By choosing to not allow new housing development, we effectively force people into being poor,” said Elizabeth Hansburg, director of People for Housing OC.

UC Irvine conducted a survey in 2024 that found 51% of residents have considered leaving Orange County. They cited the cost of housing as their most common concern.

Hansburg said if cities don’t update zoning and permitting rules to let developers build more apartments, townhomes and condos, workers earning around $100,000 per year will choose to look for cheaper housing elsewhere.

“They're the most likely to move out of Orange County, because those are the people whose quality of life will be most improved by lower housing costs,” Hansburg said.

What about workers earning even less?

According to a recent report from the California Housing Partnership, Orange County renters need to earn about $56 per hour, or about $116,000 on a full-time salary, in order to afford the region’s average monthly asking rent of $2,913.

Many low-income workers earn nowhere near that amount. Full-time minimum wage workers earn about a third of the county’s new $104,200 low-income limit.

Cesar Covarrubias is executive director of The Kennedy Commission, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing in the region. He said many workers typically can’t pay for rent on their own.

“People have to double up, overcrowd, have two or three families live together,” Covarrubias said.

“That burden is heavier on the low-income families,” Covarrubias said. “The higher-income families, yes, a lot of their money is going towards housing. But their income is still helping them move on and be able to survive.”

College graduates move back home 

Some young professionals are continuing to live in their childhood homes.

Joe Silva, a 26-year-old client billing analyst at an investment management company, lives with his mother and two younger brothers in a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Ana.

Silva said despite earning around $85,000 per year, his income isn’t enough to move the family into a larger two-bedroom unit.

“They want you making around two-and-a-half times whatever the rent is,” said Silva, a Claremont McKenna College graduate. “You have to make close to $110,000 to get a place.”

Silva said he worked hard in college and has progressed in his career. But he still feels behind on keeping up with Orange County housing costs.

“If you ask anyone my age, I don't think most people are even looking at owning a home at this point,” Silva said. “That's how bad it's gotten.”

Digging deeper into the data

In Orange County, workers can qualify as “low-income” while still earning more than most other workers in the county. Because of a quirk in the way the thresholds are calculated, the low-income limit is higher than the county’s median income of $97,000 for individuals.

That’s because officials weigh income data against local housing costs. When housing costs are exceptionally high, officials increase the income limits to give more people access to assistance.

“Even if you have an income that seems high by national standards, you're very likely to find housing extremely unaffordable” in Orange County, said Nicholas Marantz, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine.

Marantz said the rules behind the government calculations account for this imbalance between wages and housing costs, which “results in these situations that seem, to many people, somewhat absurd.”

How OC stacks up to other counties

The state’s income limits vary depending on household size and location. A family of four is low income in Orange County if it earns $148,850 per year or less. In neighboring Los Angeles County, the cut-offs are lower: $93,300 for individuals and $133,250 for families of four.

Individuals earning six-figure salaries also qualify as low income in Santa Barbara County, as well as in many parts in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, such as Marin County, San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, Santa Cruz County and San Francisco County.

Adam Sampsell said he earns about $108,000 as a mechanical engineer. He splits rent with a roommate in the city of Orange. He said he’s earning more than many of his peers, but still feels burdened by the region’s housing costs.

“It is quite disheartening,” Sampsell said. “Even though I have this high salary, and I'll probably continue to increase my salary as I get more experience in my job, there's a very high likelihood that without marrying somebody soon, I will never be able to afford a house.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

There are still more than two months to go until the Nov. 3 election, and Inglewood’s stadiums and a billboard company have already dumped more than $3.4 million into ballot measure campaigns.

One campaign committee burned through more than $2.1 million of stadium money in the first six months of the year, according to campaign filings. A rival billboard-backed committee poured almost $1.3 million into its own campaign.

Inglewood locals are set to vote in the Nov. 3 election on a trio of ballot measures that would hike taxes on large event tickets, restrict commercial ads on public roads and provide nearly $400 million in property tax bonds to the school system. 

The stadium tax and commercial ad initiatives are framed around the needs of locals, and each could have real effects on city revenue streams and how Inglewood engages with stadium visitors.

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But campaign filings released by the city in response to a public records request show nearly all the funds for two competing campaigns have come from Hollywood Park, the Kia Forum and billboard company WOW Media. 

The expensive battle between WOW and the stadiums, who have video billboards of their own, essentially boils down to an advertising turf war, according to Ron Camhi, an attorney who works in commercial real estate and digital advertising.

“This is really a fight over scarce assets and access to millions of consumers attending some of the highest profile sports and entertainment events in the world,” Camhi said. 

Neither campaign responded to an interview request.

The ballot measures are partly the overflow of a year-long court fight over WOW’s growing fleet of video billboards and twisting kiosks. WOW scored a big win over the stadiums in that case earlier this summer.

Here’s a breakdown of the more than $3.4 million spent

Hollywood Park and the Kia Forum funded nearly all of a campaign committee called Neighbors for Beautiful Inglewood. Kevani, Inc., which operates a large billboard outside the Kia Forum, also pitched in $10,000 into the committee, documents say. 

The committee spent more than $2.1 million campaigning for the advertising measure in the first six months of the year, according to campaign finance documents.

The committee had more than $1.7 million left in its account as of June 30, according to the filings.

Check out the full campaign finance filing below.

460 – Neighbors for Beautiful Inglewood (Amendment) 4.26 – 6.26 (1)Download
WOW Media’s campaign committee, Inglewood Residents for Stadium Accountability, spent more than $1.3 million in the same six-month period to fight the advertising restrictions and promote the stadium tax increase.

At the end of June, the WOW-funded committee had just over $400,000 left in its account, according to filing documents. 

Check out the full campaign finance filing below.

460 – Inglewood Residents for Stadium Accountability 4.26-6.26 (1)Download

Elected leaders in Los Angeles have decided that more deliberation is needed before they agree to a plan that would pause the city’s homeless encampment sweeps during environmental disasters.

The L.A. City Council was scheduled to take up a proposal Wednesday that would have directed the city’s Sanitation Bureau to suspend encampment sweeps in neighborhoods affected by environmental emergencies declared by city or state officials.

But at the start of the meeting, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced an amendment to the proposal. Instead of ordering the bureau to make the change, her new language instructed the bureau to “report back on options” for suspending sweeps during emergencies.

All 15 councilmembers voted to approve that amended proposal, which sets no due date for the bureau’s report.

How the proposal came about

Jurado represents Boyle Heights, the neighborhood that was recently choked with noxious smoke and rotting food odor as a result of the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire. She introduced the proposal to suspend encampments sweeps during emergencies shortly after that fire broke out in June.

In her original motion, Jurado wrote that the city’s regular encampment sweeps “serve important sanitation and public health purposes,” but can harm unhoused people who are trying to take whatever refuge they can from nearby hazards.

“During periods of extreme heat, poor air quality, smoke, hazardous debris or other environmental emergencies, requiring unsheltered residents to remain outdoors while relocating their belongings may increase their exposure to dangerous conditions,” Jurado wrote.

The City Council could still implement this change after receiving the report they’ve now requested from the Sanitation Bureau, though the timing remains unclear.

If the changes are implemented, they could affect thousands of people across the city. According to the region’s latest homeless count, the city of L.A. has more than 45,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night. About 60% of them are unsheltered.

Sweeps can harm physical and mental health

The city’s encampment sweeps typically require unhoused people to dismantle their tents or makeshift shelters, pack up their belongings and relocate so that sanitation crews can clean sidewalks and other public areas.

Service providers have said sweeps can cause them to lose touch with the unhoused people they’re trying to help. Public health researchers have found that sweeps, which happen at least monthly for about a third of L.A.’s unhoused residents, can worsen unhoused people’s physical and mental health.

A study published earlier this year found that sweeps in L.A. County were associated with poorer physical health and worse psychological distress, as reported by hundreds of surveyed unhoused Angelenos.

Randall Kuhn, a professor of community health sciences at UCLA who co-authored the study, said the city should ideally give unhoused people a chance to enter safe indoor shelters during emergencies. Barring that, he said, the city should at least allow people to stay put.

“The idea that you now want to kick them out of that spot where they've managed to stay safe, to stay alive, and tell them that they now need to start walking around, carrying all their stuff in 108-degree weather, it's not only harmful and unethical, but it's inviting legal action,” Kuhn said.

As originally written, Jurado’s proposal would have instructed the Sanitation Bureau to post notices in areas affected by officially declared emergencies, letting unhoused people know that scheduled cleanups would not happen.

Officials would also have been required to notify residents about suspended sweeps through postings at cooling centers and shelters, on social media and through other public channels.

In an era when countless recipes are available at our fingertips, and endless culinary hacks crowd social media, cookbooks remain refreshingly relevant by offering authoritative voices, immersive storytelling, and rich cultural context that digital feeds cannot match.

They also make for functional yet fashionable decor at some of Los Angeles’s buzziest restaurants.

Eagle-eyed Angelenos may have noticed cookbooks displayed at many local spots arranged among knick-knacks, like at chef Eric Greenspan’s newly opened Mish Delicatessen on La Brea, or in open kitchens within easy reach, as at chef Dave Beran’s Michelin-starred Seline in Santa Monica. These dog-eared, oil-stained volumes not only enhance a space's visual appeal but often map a chef’s heritage, pedigree and community.

“It just brings this energy to a space; these are my icons, my idols, my people I've learned from, whether through books or in real life, and it's a big honor to be able to have them on the shelf,” says Tyler Wells, the restaurateur behind Betsy and Bar Betsy in Altadena. “I think it's more an ethos than a design decision.”

The cookbooks highlighted below have earned a place on the bookshelves of some of Los Angeles’s top chefs and restaurateurs — and are worthy of adding to your personal collection, whether you’re a dedicated home cook sharpening your skills or a casual food lover gleaning dinnertime inspiration. Listed in alphabetical order.

'A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes' by David Tanis

Recommended by: Luis Sierra of Picala in West Adams

Chef Luis Sierra keeps two dozen of his most prized cookbooks on a shelf above the pass at Picala, a Spanish restaurant in West Adams that opened in April. Raised in New Mexico on a steady diet of red and green chilies, the chef relied on cookbooks and food magazines like Lucky Peach to provide a window into cultures and cuisines unavailable locally.

Though a heavily tabbed copy of Colman Andrews's Catalan Cuisine ranks near the top of Sierra’s most-used cookbooks, he returns time and again to David Tanis’s seminal ode to simple and seasonal cooking in A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes; the chef worked under Tanis at Lulu at the Hammer Museum before opening Picala.

“It is quintessential California cuisine. It's that ethos that fine dining does and some of the best mom-and-pop places do. Find really good ingredients and don't mess it up. Just treat it fairly, don't try to make it something it's not,” Sierra said. “It took me years to figure out what [Tanis] was trying to say.”

'Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails' by Alex Day, David Kaplan, and Nick Fauchald

Recommended by: Avish Naran of Pijja Palace in Silver Lake

Pijja Palace's cookbooks include the influential cocktail guide from Death & Co.

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Courtesy Pijja Palace

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At Avish Naran’s boisterous Indian sports bar, Pijja Palace, in Silver Lake, a tightly curated stack of cookbooks is located near the kitchen pass. Titles like Kricket: An Indian-Inspired Cookbook by Will Bowlby and chef Atul Kochhar’s Benares serve as education and inspiration for the restaurant’s mostly non-Indian staff. A copy of Khushbu Shah’s Amrikan, left over from a cookbook launch hosted at the restaurant a few years back, shares a similar diasporic sensibility to Pijja Palace.

Anchoring the teetering titles are a pair of cocktail bibles from the acclaimed New York City bar Death & Co. — Modern Classic Cocktails and Welcome Home — that Naran considers indispensable guides.

“They teach you the fundamentals of making cocktails. They're not using hydrocolloids and centrifuges. It's about appreciating the bottle and the classics,” he said. “We use them from time to time for inspiration at our restaurant. They give you a blueprint of all the classic cocktails and even encourage you to swap shit out.”

'Ducksoup: The Wisdom of Simple Cooking' by Clare Lattin and Tom Hill

Recommended by: Heather Sperling of Botanica in Silver Lake

Cookbooks subtly add to the ambience at Botanica in Silver Lake

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Heather Sperling

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Courtesy Botanica

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Heather Sperling, the restaurateur behind Botanica and Bar Besito in Silver Lake, is a self-proclaimed bibliophile with a penchant for restaurant cookbooks. Stored above Botanica’s bar and service station is a curated collection of her favorites. These titles come from like-minded restaurants that share Botanica's dedication to simplicity and seasonality, including works from Prune in New York City, Lula Cafe in Chicago, and the Bay Area’s Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse Cafe.

“I love having those around as a way to remind us of the places that we view as both peers and inspiration,” Sperling said. Additionally, Sperling uses the cookbooks to facilitate conversations around food and cooking with her chefs.

Of the hundreds of cookbooks that Sperling has come across, it’s the collection of recipes from the restaurant Ducksoup in London that’s made a lasting impression.

“Ducksoup: The Wisdom of Simple Cooking is the one that I've given to every chef who has ever worked for me,” she said. “It is a simple and quietly excellent book of great cooking with some lovely simple stories and unbelievably good food that just captures a sensibility that I aspire to, which is just cooking lovely, thoughtful, compelling, unfussy food in a way that feels very full of heart and full of intention.”

'Josey Baker Bread' by Josey Baker

Recommended by: Tyler Wells of Bar Betsy in Altadena

Ever since the Eaton Fire wiped out restaurateur Tyler Wells’s cookbook collection, he’s been intentionally rebuilding it with mostly secondhand copies and displaying the titles on the shelves at his all-day restaurant Bar Betsy in Altadena. Wells described his growing collection as “quite aspirational,” consisting “mostly of restaurants that I adore and look up to” and written by experts with a singular perspective and style.

Among his most prized cookbooks is Josey Baker Bread by Josey Baker, the chef and owner of The Mill in San Francisco.

“I really adore baking, and it was something I never really had formal training in, so I'm largely self-taught. This book just takes you from nothing — here's how you make the simplest loaf pan loaf with yeast — all the way to free-form bread,” Wells said. “It's so down to Earth; it's not geared for a professional baker. I learned more from that book than probably any other cookbook I've read.”

'The French Laundry Cookbook' by Michael Ruhlman, Susie Heller, and Thomas Keller

Recommended by: Dave Beran of Seline in Santa Monica

Seline's salute to gastronomic literature includes over 100 cookbooks.

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Courtesy Seline

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When chef Dave Beran conceptualized his “book wall” — an expansive library with over 100 cookbooks prominently displayed in the open kitchen at Seline in Santa Monica — providing inspiration and education for him and his team, as well as creating a sense of home, comfort, and curiosity for diners, was at the forefront.

While Beran admits that The French Laundry Cookbook, a comprehensive collection of recipes and philosophies from chef Thomas Keller’s legendary restaurant in Yountville, California, feels dated in many ways, its impact can’t be understated.

“I remember reading it when I first started working in 2003. It was just such a clear defining point of this is why it's important to teach, and this is why it's important to pay attention and be a sponge in a kitchen,” Beran said. “I think if you're completely blind to fine dining in a sense of ‘Where's the value in this thing that I feel like I've had 100 times,’ that's the book to read.”

'Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables' by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg

Recommended by: Clémence de Lutz of Petitgrain Boulangerie in Santa Monica

Take a peek beneath the gleaming pastry case at Santa Monica's Petitgrain Boulangerie to spot a few of chef-owner Clémence de Lutz’s tallest cookbooks. Selected from her personal collection that numbers more than 400, these oversized titles pull double duty: they elegantly separate the bakery’s kitchen from the storefront while hiding unsightly coffee supplies. As a self-taught baker, de Lutz leaned heavily on cookbooks for foundational knowledge.

“I would buy used cookbooks from the Culinary Institute of America or some of the other more professional culinary schools, and I would tool around and give myself a curriculum,” she said.

These days, de Lutz favors cookbooks rooted in West Coast ingredients, especially Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg.

“I appreciated when I first saw the book that it said ‘six seasons’ because here in California, there's so much overlap between summer and fall. We shouldn't just think about winter, spring, summer, and fall,” she said. “I appreciate that it's not precious; it's good, succinct information. We should all be cooking more vegetables for their flavor at their peak.”

'Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking' by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook

Recommended by: Eric Greenspan of Mish Delicatessen in Mid-City

At Mid-City’s Mish Delicatessen, chef-owner Eric Greenspan says the cookbooks tell “the story of the evolution — past, present, and future — of the Mish menu.”

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Courtesy Mish Delicatessen

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At Mid-City’s Mish Delicatessen, diners are welcome to linger in the second-floor lounge to peruse the restaurant’s many cookbooks featuring titles from classic New York City delis, more modern collections penned by contemporary culinarians like Jake Cohen and Adeena Sussman, and everything in between.

Each cookbook tells “the story of the evolution — past, present, and future — of the Mish menu,” said chef-owner Eric Greenspan. “It was really important for us to focus on the entirety of the Jewish culinary diaspora.”

Zahav, the cookbook from Michael Solomonoff's acclaimed restaurant in Philadelphia by the same name, deeply influenced Greenspan’s vision for Mish.

“Michael's such an inspirational chef, both in his take on modernizing and elevating classic Middle Eastern Jewish food, but also the fact that he pulls it off from a deep, personal relationship with the food,” Greenspan said. “And that's what inspired me to do the whole damn thing. I wanted to finally have a restaurant where I could cook something personal to me from a cultural and traditional sense.”

When A.W.’s husband lost his job, she was thankful the safety net preserved the family’s access to healthcare. Her eldest son had a team of doctors and therapists at Stanford’s specialty gender clinic; losing that support team, she said, would have been traumatic. The clinic accepted Medi-Cal patients.

Now, California is racing to keep children like A.W.’s son from losing access to gender-affirming care after the federal government moved to cut off funding for those services. State lawmakers are scrambling to approve emergency funding in the last days of the legislative session, even as LGBTQ advocates and parents argue California had months to prepare for the change — and may still fail to prevent a gap in care.

This month the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized a rule prohibiting federal reimbursement for gender-affirming care for minors. It takes effect Oct. 13. Roughly 1,500 transgender and gender-nonconforming children on Medi-Cal could lose access to puberty blockers, hormones and related care if the state doesn’t act.

Lawmakers want an emergency $10 million to replace the lost federal funds. The money would buy time for the state to create a separate funding pathway for transgender kids that complies with federal rules, though the Department of Health Care Services says that could take up to a year.

A funding pathway would keep state dollars separate from federal dollars, and allow Medi-Cal children to keep receiving care without disruption. Without it, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth could lose access to ongoing medical treatments.

“They’re low-income Californians who need support arguably the most, and Medi-Cal is their lifeline to access that care,” said Assemblymember Chris Ward, a Democrat from San Diego and chair of the LGBTQ caucus, which is fighting for the money. “We need to stand up for them.”

But some LGBTQ organizations and parents, including A.W., doubt California’s Medi-Cal agency can stand-up a separate program for transgender kids in under six weeks. They also say they feel misled by state leaders after months of budget negotiations.

For the past eight months, advocates and medical organizations had warned California’s Medi-Cal agency that the federal government intended to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors. They believed state leaders had set aside money to prepare for that outcome during June budget negotiations, but later learned officials did not follow through.

“I thought that when we took our kids to Sacramento to meet with members of the Assembly and Senate that we were advocating for a backfill that would cover kids on Medi-Cal who would lose those federal dollars,” A.W. said. “I’m really disappointed that our coalition spent so much time and effort on something that I’m not sure we’ll reap the benefits of, and that sucks.”

CalMatters is identifying A.W. by initials only to protect the identity of her two children, both of whom are transgender.

Why California wasn’t ready

In December, the Trump administration published preliminary rules targeting payments for gender-affirming services for young people.

Though the rules weren’t finalized until August, advocacy groups spent months with state officials negotiating for a program that would protect transgender children on Medi-Cal, according to budget letters and presentations obtained by CalMatters. They wanted the state to set aside $1 million to create a separate Medi-Cal funding pathway and to use other money to bolster access to care.

Many believed the state had done exactly that in June, when the budget included two pots of money totalling $56 million for gender-affirming services and reproductive healthcare. After the budget passed, advocates learned health and budget officials for Gov. Gavin Newsom had removed language that would have ensured some of the money would be used to create a separate, state-only Medi-Cal funding program for transgender children.

The Department of Health Care Services, which administers Medi-Cal, did not answer questions about why the money wasn’t earmarked for Medi-Cal and whether there would be any gap in services for transgender children. It referred CalMatters to the Department of Finance. A finance department spokesperson said the administration was “aware of this particular issue” but had no updates to share.

Ward said the budget, which addressed California’s fourth consecutive deficit, didn’t have “a nickel to spare,” and because federal rules hadn’t been finalized at the time, the Medi-Cal funding commitment wasn’t locked in.

On social media, the California Department of Health and Human Services pointed to the $56 in the budget, saying it remains “committed to ensuring all people have access to the medically necessary, evidence-based care that will allow them not only to survive, but thrive.”

Arne Johnson, an organizer with Rainbow Families Action, called that statement misleading. “In the end, not a penny of it is going to backfill Medi-Cal at all,” Johnson said.

The money will instead fund infrastructure investments for transgender health clinics as more care gets pushed out of hospitals and into primary care settings under federal threats, and will aid other groups that have lost federal funding, including military families and veterans, according to two sources familiar with budget negotiations.

Many advocacy groups said California’s long-term investment is welcome, but argue the state failed to protect the immediate care of vulnerable children.

“It’s been very frustrating to see California say in many words that it’s supportive of trans people, and be so unprepared for something we all knew was about to happen,” Johnson said.

Laura Sheckler, budget and policy director at the California Primary Care Association, which represents clinics, said the state will have a challenging time creating a program by the time the federal cuts are expected to begin.

“The bigger question is how is California going to ensure that whatever they set up is going to be available on Oct. 13 when these rules go into effect?” Sheckler said.

For one family, Medi-Cal was the safety net

A.W. and her family are bracing for that deadline and what they anticipate will be an inevitable loss of care.

Discovering that her first child was transgender prompted a personal reckoning for A.W. She had spent most of her career working in conservative politics for prominent Republican leaders. At home, though, her first child showed signs of gender dysphoria even as a toddler, pulling bows out of his hair, crying when forced to wear a dress and asking why he couldn’t stand up to pee.

A.W. and her husband chalked it up to tomboy behavior.

“We had zero education or inkling that he might be trans, but as we started educating ourselves and learning more, we realized that he at a very, very young age was verbally communicating with us who he is,” A.W. said.

After the family moved from Virginia to the Bay Area for work, her son, who was 8 at the time, started seeing a therapist. A year and a half later he received his first puberty blocker, and has continued to see therapists and endocrinologists at Stanford ever since. Medi-Cal allowed her son to keep seeing the same doctors when the startup where A.W.'s husband worked went under two years ago.

“I say that (my son) has really opened me up and made me see things and accept things that I didn’t understand,” A.W. said. “For me, it was a huge transformation.”

Just last year, A.W.’s second child also came out as transgender. It was surprising, but both parents say part of parenting is loving their children unconditionally.

Either child losing healthcare — even temporarily — would be devastating, but for her eldest, now 15 and giving himself testosterone injections weekly, the consequences could be permanent.

“A gap in care for my son is a terrible thing. He doesn’t take testosterone and what happens? He would be forced to medically detransition,” A.W. said. “It’s unacceptable that the state wasn’t prepared.”

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.