The Biden-Harris administration has cleared a path for its unelected bureaucrats in the nation’s top health agency to declare as “child abusers” parents who wish to protect their children from life-altering experimental “gender transition” drugs and surgeries.
A report Monday at the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) traces the transformation of child protective agencies throughout America under the guise of “equity” and “health care” into policing units that threaten parents into consenting to so-called “gender-affirming” treatments for their confused children – or else lose custody.
The DCNF report follows remarks made last fall during a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) webinar by Alexander Roque, president and executive director of the Ali Forney Center (AFC), which provides young people “with quality services in an LGBTQ+ affirming environment,” according to its website:
Given the discrimination and harassment that so many of these young adults face, they need comprehensive support to develop pride and security in their LGBTQ+ identities.
During the webinar, titled “Emerging Practices for Supporting LGBTQI Young People,” Roque revealed his disdain for “conservative families” whom he claims are living in “hate”-filled “homophobic or transphobic communities”:
I have to say homophobia and transphobia is so deeply rooted in people’s experiences in lives, and hate is isolating … but you have to build communities for families that look like the families who are experiencing this hateful experience of homophobia or transphobia, building community care and connection around lived experiences of the actual family. So families who are conservative families, who have been in homophobic or transphobic communities, need to actually see themselves and other families who accept their children, who accept LGBTQ folks, and who have been able to build the bridge over this really hateful experience that they’ve had.
… there is an opportunity, I think, to extend a connection, to show them there’s a way to get over this hate. There’s a way to accept your family, your child, your loved ones, in spite of what you’ve been led to believe for yourself for your entire life.
Later in the webinar, Roque went further by acknowledging he has a “different take on how we can protect young people,” one that claims not affirming your young child’s perceived change in gender identity is the equivalent of refusing to feed them.
“There are no systems that prosecute or address family rejection as it relates to homophobia or transphobia,” he said:
If you abuse your child, if you don’t send your child to school, if you deny your child food, that’s considered child abuse; and there are systems that help those families. I’m not saying to be punitive. I’m saying when you identify there’s abuse, you are then able to support the family – it’s identified in court. It’s identified in the child protective systems.
Roque then spelled out the following narrative, revealing his anti-faith bias as well, as the path forward for policy change, one that would force mental health professionals – who are mandated reporters of child abuse – to report parents who resist gender ideology as “abusive”:
[H]omophobia and transphobia is child abuse, and we need to recognize it as such. I think providers really need to take that on and give face and value to the detriment of homophobia and transphobia of family rejection. It’s so vital that we take a stand – that we make our court system, that we push our systems to identify this as such. We had so many instances where young people have run away from their homes, have come into our care, and we’ve literally had to hand over a young person to their family in front of a child protective worker because they said that it’s a personal family view – that homophobia and transphobia is a personal family view and that the child is not being abused although that child is being made to pray the gay away, is being told they are going to have HIV if they’re gay, is being told really, really awful things.
“Right now, nothing happens to those families,” Roque lamented:
Not one of the families whose young people are in our care make any headlines for kicking the young people out, for rejecting them, for denying them love, care, shelter or a home. If they were denying them food or denying them access to school or denying other things, there would be headlines. There would be prosecution. There would be court systems.
DCNF authors Katelynn Richardson and Megan Brock note that, in this Biden-Harris era, “Roque’s definition of abuse is not fringe, and his vision for reshaping the system is not hypothetical.”
In April, the administration finalized its rule that, it declared, “strengthens protections for youth in foster care by clarifying how states must meet their statutory requirements to appropriately serve LGBTQI+ children in foster care.”
The rule specifies that “state child welfare agencies must ensure that LGBTQI+ children have access to specially designated foster care placements” that affirm their new gender identity.
DCNF explained:
These “designated placements” must commit to creating an environment that supports a child’s “status or identity,” including through access to age-appropriate “resources, services, and activities.” To gender activists consulted by the Biden administration, being “affirming” means assuming the child knows best about his or her identity — even if what he or she claims to want is life-altering medical procedures like hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries to appear more like the opposite sex.
The report focused on Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where, since the Obama administration, HHS officials had been following a model program by social workers that “strong-arms parents into affirming whatever confused beliefs children express about their gender.”
“Parents who decline risk losing a voice in their child’s life,” DCNF observed, adding that emails and records obtained through public record requests revealed HHS provided taxpayer funds to further develop the Cuyahoga County program that would infuse “gender ideology into foster care and social services.”
Ultimately, the county’s model was named “AFFIRM.ME” and was comprised of four interventions: identifying LGBT young people, urging parents to “affirm” their children’s identities, helping LGBT youth find other “affirming” adults, and training prospective foster parents to provide “affirming” care.
Manhattan Institute Policy Analyst Joseph Figliolia explained to the DCNF how LGBT activists manipulate others into buying into the “gender-affirmation” narrative.
“Programs like Affirm Me take for granted that affirmation is consistent with promoting the health and general welfare of a child, and conversely, that non-affirmation is akin to a form of emotional or psychological abuse,” he said, adding that such programs “are used to try and establish the intellectual architecture needed to advance policies that promote affirmation as the default intervention for gender dysphoria by linking it with the mental and emotional welfare of children.”