Earlier this year, we covered a story about a  California boy “identifying as female” using the girls locker room at his high school.

Subsequently, in July, the state legislature passed AB 1266, requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and participate on sports teams that match the gender they feel identifies them.

There has been a state-wide surge of outrage that is shaping into a ballot battle next November:

Petitions are “pouring in” to block a new California law that opponents say will give boys the right to use girls’ bathrooms and showers.

If sufficient petitions are turned in Nov. 8 and verified, the new law, AB 1266, will be suspended until voters can decide whether to keep it or not in the November 2014 election. If the petition effort fails, the new law goes into effect Jan. 1.

Some 505,000 signatures are needed, and the campaign is on track to be successful, said Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute.

Ms. England declined to say exactly how many signatures had been collected, but when asked Friday whether she and other leaders of Privacy for All Students expect to have a positive announcement, Ms. England replied, “Absolutely.”

“The mail-in petitions are pouring in,” she said. “We are processing them as fast as we can.”

The coalition’s previously announced goal was to gather between 650,000 to 700,000 signatures by this Wednesday. Churches, civic groups and signature-gatherers, both paid and unpaid, were going to be active over the weekend, Ms. England said.

The Privacy for All Students coalition opposes the law because it believes it would force school officials to permit children and teens to decide — without evidence — which gender they perceive themselves to be, and to use restrooms, lockers, showers and facilities and join teams and activities that fit that gender.

“Imagine your daughter or granddaughter having a share a shower with a male student. All the male student has to do is claim a female gender identity, and AB 1266 gives him the absolute right to shower with female students,” the campaign says.

Under current law, transgender children and their families take steps to “assert” their preferred gender identity, and school districts — which must accommodate those identities “in some capacity” — craft plans with the parents and children to handle issues related to sex-segregated rooms and programs, Ms. England said.

AB 1266 has to be defeated because it ends “local discretion” in these matters, constitutes an “invasion of privacy” for students of the opposite sex, and steers the culture into “a genderless future,” the coalition says.