The battle over trans youth in social services
For many years, the social services have been an under-reported battleground in the fight over LGBTQ youth.
Spanning adoption, foster care, and the systems most frequently referred to as “child protection” and “child welfare”, social services straddle the line between public and private more than any other domain of government. Despite the widespread attention focused on attacking inclusive education and gender-affirming care, battles over the social services predate much of the current moral panic.
However, several of these arenas of contention have spilled onto the national stage, and understanding how we got here is crucial to the survival of thousands of young people across the country, the majority of whom are transgender.
Currently, Congress is slated to hear House Bill 1866, which seeks to amend the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) to explicitly exclude attempts at forcing gender diverse youth to be cisgender. This capitalizes on a series of increasingly brazenly dishonest claims by members of congress that social services across the country are surreptitiously transitioning children against their parents’ wishes. While the move is part of the broader campaign of eliminationism aimed at transgender people across the United States, it also represents the culmination of diligent efforts over decades to counteract the progress made in social service organizations and the social sciences recognizing the destructive and barbaric nature of conversion therapy, alongside the crucial role that having a loving and affirming family plays in mitigating the associated elevated health risks such as suicide, faced by gender and sexual minority youth.
That LGBTQ young people make up a massively disproportionate number of homeless youth is an indisputable fact, and while social workers and progressive policy makers have worked to address this, groups like the Heritage Foundation seek to stop that progress at any cost. We are poised nationally to reverse course on any and all steps taken to protect LGBTQ youth in the past several decades with efforts in front of Congress, state legislatures, by the Executive Branch, and courts at all levels from district to the Supreme Court.
Taking advantage of an impossibly complex landscape
While movements like this exist around the world, in the United States, the campaign domestically has been tailored to exploit the heterogeneous structure of social welfare policies and infrastructure. Social service policies and institutions vary greatly from state to state, and many of the core functions that make up what we typically describe as “social services” are subcontracted out to private nongovernmental organizations and/or 501(c)(3) nonprofits. To complicate matters further, even the names of the respective departments also vary widely, as do which departments within the state government oversee them.
For example, while each city and state has its own regulations and policies related to foster care placement, these may be inconsistent between jurisdictions. While in theory the federal government exercises regulatory authority over these matters, ultimately it is the state which exercises the majority of regulatory discretion over agencies, and the governmental departments which perform the actual tasks are under the authority of the state government. The policies of NGOs are similarly varied. While some agencies may have policies dedicated to cultural preservation (eg, maintaining a young person’s ties to their culture of origin, described in another section), others may see these as ancillary functions to aspire to, but not critical to the mission.
The path from adoption eligibility to permanent placement may look quite different for two children even if they’re adopted in the same region of the United States. For example, in Massachusetts, aside from the involvement of both the probate courts and the state Department of Children and Families, the contract for caring for, and placing, children in pre-adoptive homes may be divided between more than one agency. While DCF may award a contract for recruiting and training foster parents to one agency, an entirely different agency may be tasked with seeking out prospective adoptive families. A single child may interface with dozens of workers, and many will cycle through half a dozen temporary placements before finding a forever home.
The most friction related to discrimination against LGBTQ people within these systems, however, stems primarily from the fact that In most of the country, the existing infrastructure for caring for children is religiously run. Nearly all of the initial infrastructure across the country comes from churches, and most remains religiously affiliated— with the Catholic Church making up one of the largest shares of residential homes (sometimes still referred to anachronistically as “orphanages”) and adoption agencies. Attempts to secularize social services have been met with strong resistance, with attempts at both the state and national levels to create exemptions for religious organizations from specific civil rights laws related to sexual orientation and gender.
This culminated in an enormous shift with Fulton v. Philadelphia in 2021. In Fulton, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that private agencies facilitating adoptions were allowed to refuse to place children with gay parents. This has re-opened a debate about whether the state can require adoptive parents to affirm gay and transgender children, and by extension, require oversight to this end of private agencies with state and municipal contracts.
For an excellent overview of the case that led to Fulton, check out the 5-4 podcast’s episode on the history of the case, as well as the asinine SCOTUS ruling that resulted.
Culural preservation movements
It also is impossible to understand these battles without looking first to a large list of crimes against children and families committed in the name of social service agencies throughout the history of the United States. Up until fairly recently in the country’s history, what we would now call social services have been explicitly implicated in the widespread removal of non-white children from their parents in an attempt to “Christianize” them— that is, to convert them by force to Christianity and wipe out connections to culture of origin and indigeneity.
Native American children were taken from their famlies en masse, often as part of, or as a precursor to, massacres of Native peoples. Many children were sent to religious boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking any language other than English, and forced to dress and behave as white children while being forced into manual and/or slave labor. The residential schools are widely understood to have been a crucial component of the genocide against Native and First Nations peoples.
In recognition of these atrocities, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 attempted to enforce guardrails that would preserve tribal oversight of child removal from Native American families. Out of ICWA, movements formed to prevent “culture loss”. Bills later passed banning the imposition of religion on children in social services altogether, in theory guarding against any number of efforts to force children to give up the cultures from which they came and to prevent social services from being used to enforce cultural hegemony. This was expanded gradually over time, but at present most states require prospective adoptive and foster parents to agree to respect the race, religion, ethnicity, cultural traditions and tribal affiliations of any children they take into their homes. Within the past 20 years, sexual orientation has been added to that list, and most recently, gender diversity. To dismantle this growing infrastructure, the far-right has manufactured the veneer of a crisis that pits faith against the social services.
The myth of the overzealous, pro-trans state
There are many pathways to becoming involved in the social services in the United States, and in addition to the variation described above in the introduction, there are big gaps in what is considered to constitute justified intervention by the state. Corporal punishment is poorly defined statutorily and at the agency/policy level. This has predictably resulted in the systemic enforcement of racial policing, and an enormous body of research shows that child protection decisions vary largely between cases with similar scenarios but for families of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. This has led to calls within the field of social work for either reform or abolition.
Regardless of where you stand on the legitimacy and/or efficacy of the existing system, the need to protect young people remains, and these have tended to center around youth autonomy as a primary facilitator of human rights. Youth autonomy is not universally beloved. As groups like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family have grown in prowess (now also a central partner in the war on bodily autonomy as well), movements to bring back corporal punishment and strict discipline have become lightning rods for conservative politicians seeking to establish themselves in the conservative public eye. These “parental rights” movements are almost invariably fused with religious liberty arguments, and it is upon these that many of the bills put forth in the past several years have hinged. This is likely because the 1st amendment is intractably decided in favor of religious liberty, with the broadest freedoms typically afforded to religious over secular interests. This may be why the courts appear to be siding with anti-trans teachers who refuse to use students’ affirmed names, but against those same students. Courts appear to suggest that the teacher who espouses a right to misgender a young person has rights that supercede those of the young person seeking to be gendered correctly — despite the clear fact that the gender in dispute is that of the student, not the teacher.
In the few circumstances when LGBTQ children have been removed from their homes in part due to non-affirmation of sexual orientation or gender identity, court arguments have typically claimed this constitutes religious discrimination.
In point of fact, unfortunately there is no state in the country where not accepting your child as gay or trans is itself considered enough justification for removal. This has not stopped the right-wing media machine from creating a tapestry out of such claims, with a willing conservative press unencumbered by the truth to print it.
The fictive pro-trans state in child protection
The path to platforming conspiracy theories about children being “kidnapped” from their parents for surreptitious “sex changes” on the campaign trail and at the 2024 Republican National Convention is largely the story of bad reporting and opportunistic politicians. Major think tanks will create legal arguments based off of wins in court, such as with Fulton, and then shop around for cases that can be used in impact litigation.
Many of these cases began with allegations of child abuse by teachers and other mandated reporters in young people’s lives. When allegations are made, they initiate a chain of events that often surfaces more than the original claim — which has admittedly generated a substantial amount of debate over the role of due process. This is a far cry from the stories told on Fox News however, which allege not only that investigations were done with the express purpose of affirming transgender youth, but that they were surgically transitioning children in secret, and doing so specifically because their non-affirming parents were devout Christians. As absurd as this sounds on its face, the past election has shown that Americans have increasingly disparate impressions of what is true.
The process of embellishing the truth is made effortless by the refusal of news sites to discern between blogs and media outlets with appropriate vetting policies, which allows for reciprocal citation.
Outlet A: more mainstream news stories will rely on salacious frames but stick to statements of fact.
Outlet B: Less mainstream outlets will take the implications as themselves statements of truth
Outlet C: Outlets which straddle both lines will cite both the original outlets and the secondary sources, legitimizing the false claim of outlet B.
Outlet A: will publish a high profile “controversy piece” stating “both sides”. The two sides are between Outlets A and B, while no outlet D exists telling an alternative, less salacious narrative. This is in large part because the actual facts of the case are confidential.
Spreadsheet showing evolution of Montana CPS case story over 2 weeks. [View here]
Once a particular story has been transformed into a public campaign, often with the help of PR teams from major far-right law firms, political figures can cite them vaguely in bills. Despite the fact that this strategy appears not only to be working but gaining steam, progressives continue to lack a consistent strategy.
To illustrate how a single case can metastasize in the public eye, it’s important to remember how most abuse and neglect cases emerge. Under mandated reporting laws in every state, licensed practitioners such as teachers, nurses, social workers and physicians are required to alert the local child protective services if they suspect abuse or neglect of a minor. What constitutes either of these, abuse and neglect, is typically vague.
For all of their total lack of clarity around what constitutes abuse, the mandated reporting laws make one thing explicit: that it is not up to mandated reporters to investigate. Rather, reports have a rapid turn-around time to contact the responsible agency, and it is up to the agency to investigate. There are several steps to each investigation, and at each step, new information may arise that warrants further investigation by the state. Once a child protection worker has “screened in” the initial report (eg, they have found that the allegation is significantly concerning and meets the necessary criteria for investigation), it is referred for investigation. Depending on the allegation, children may remain in the home or be removed temporarily following a “care and protection” order. The factors involved in this decision are many-fold, and may not be constrained to the initial report.
In the case of In re: Cox, Indiana Department of Child Services removed a 16 year old transgender girl from her home after two allegations of abuse/neglect led investigators to discover that the girl was severely malnourished from uncontrolled anorexia. Physicians who had examined her expressed concerns about risks to brain development and cardiac health. People who struggle with eating disorders that involve restricting calories die at alarming rates from things like heart attacks, killing roughly 10,000 people a year. While the initial reports both involved expressions of concern around the fact that her family was not affirming of her trans identity, the ultimate disposition of the investigation was made not on the premise that her parents endangered her, but that she was a danger to herself. This is made explicit by the Child in Need of Service (CHINS) statute (which can be read here). Cox was determined not by CHINS-1 (abuse) and CHINS-2 (neglect), but rather CHINS-6, which is defined as "the child substantially endangers his or her own health”.
The family sued all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear their case on the grounds that it lacked merit since the decision was not decided on the grounds the parents alleged. That isn’t to say, however, that the hearings didn’t surface disturbing details which in any rational society would have been the basis for intervention. When asked about her daughter, court documents allege that one of the plaintiffs rebuked the workers’ use of her chosen name, stating “[preferred name] is the bitch who killed my son”. They continue to refer to their daughter this way, even in the filing to SCOTUS.
The battle in foster care and adoption
Child Protection, however, is far from the only domain in which disinformation campaigns such as these are occurring. Multiple lawsuits exist across the United States against various state Departments of Children and Families (or whatever the local equivalent is) alleging that, as with Fulton, the requirement of prospective foster and adoptive parents to agree to affirm LGBTQ children prior to being certified as caregivers is a violation of their religious liberty.
One such case was Lasche v. New Jersey which was originally filed in 2018 and decided in 2023. In Lasche, the courts sided with the plaintiffs, deciding that the state had wrongly suspended their ability to act as foster parents. This case was non-precedential, however, and was therefore followed by Burke v. Walsh (2024) in Massachusetts. The facts of the case are relatively similar. In Burke, the couple were asked multiple times if they would support a child who disclosed they were gay or transgender. They stated that while they felt they would be loving parents, they would not affirm such an identity. The court document, alongside DCF’s assessment, can be read here. Burke is litigated by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a right-wing law firm similar to Alliance Defending Freedom. In 2022, DeGross v Hunter was filed against the state of Washington alleging the same thing (2024).
But the results of complaints like this have been uneven. Most recently, the court declined to grant an injunction in Wuoti v. Winters in February 2025, against the state of Vermont. From the court documents, the Vermont judge was unimpressed with the religious liberty argument. The “test” given to them was simply rating on a scale of 1 to 5 whether or not they would be accepting of a gay or transgender child. While the couple sticks by the answers they provided, court documents indicate that they went past expressing that they would struggle with this and instead stated that they believed homosexuality was immoral. “Mrs. Wuoti indicated that the two of you found homosexuality to be on par with pornography and pedophilia, as items you would ‘never encourage a child to pursue.’” The court had previously declined a motion to consolidate this case with Gantt v. Winters.
Groups like ADF and BFRL are spending enormous amounts of money litigating these cases, and most of them rely on the arguments made in Fulton, which does not bode particularly well should one of these cases go in front of the current U.S. Supreme Court. To this effect, ADF has made Bates v Pakseresht a centerpeice of it’s marketing (available here). The agreement Bates declined to sign was to:
"Respect, accept and support the race, ethnicity, cultural identities, national origin, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disabilities, spiritual beliefs, and socioeconomic status, of a child or young adult in the care or custody of [ODHS], and provide opportunities to enhance the positive self-concept and understanding of the child or young adult's heritage[.]"
Facebook Ads run by ADF. From Meta Ad Library
Most of the backlash begins with stating a true fact, that the demand for foster homes is far larger than their current availability. They point to the hundreds of thousands of young people who are currently waiting for placements. Despite being the implied solution of much of the current messaging — that surely if the state wants to look out for transgender youth this doesn’t mean that they must deny placements to cisgender children as well is disingenuous at best.
When a screenshot of a transfer request from the Utah Department of Health and Human Services foster care system was shared by far-right influencer LibsofTiktok, it contained the text “the current home is not accepting of the transgender youth’s pronouns or identity.” Utah DHHS had to issue this clarification. While the implication in the original tweet was that the child had been removed due to non-affirmation, this was a transfer request — meaning that it had been an attempt by a social worker to find a more suitable foster placement for a child that had already been removed. The child was not being removed from a foster placement, but a more suitable one was being sought. This happens often, and is a function of foster care workers.
For a breakdown of laws by state, see this from Movement Advancement Project.
Legislative efforts
On March 8, 2024, Utah HB 157 passed which would enjoin the state from considering non-affirmation of a child’s gender as a factor in child custody decisions. It further binds the hands of child welfare investigators from doing the same. While the language of the bill purports to be neutral, the larger project is clear when you look at other projects the bill’s sponsor, Stephanie Gricius has put forward such as a bill that bans transgender women in college from university dorms that match their gender. Utah HB 157 is similar to Tennesee’s HB2169, also signed into law. That bill also gave parents a right of action should they feel the state Department of Child Services acted against them in a manner that abridged these rights.
Other bills are even less subtle in their efforts. South Carolina’s SB 240, titled “Parental Rights to Affirm Biological Sex in Child Welfare” seeks to position non-affirmation of transgender children as an affirmative finding in child custody matters, and “prioritizes” placement with foster parents who profess to do the same. Unlike bills in the past, which have shrouded themselves in the language of impartiality, SB 240 makes it clear where it stands: conversion should be state policy.
This is not dissimilar to Florida’s position. Signed into law in 2023, SB 254 was dubbed the “abduction bill” as it allowed non-custodial parents to take custody of their children if the other parent supports the young person’s transition. It would also give the state the right to do the same, even if the possibility of medical intervention is purely theoretical and has not actually happened yet. The abduction bill was Florida’s answer to Texas stealing the spotlight the year before when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott instructed the state Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate affirming families, causing many to have to flee the state.
Ironically, while there is no secret cabal of government workers seeking to privately facilitate social and medical transition for young people in the United States, it is clear that the opposite does indeed exist, and it is now a national movement. As stated above, HB 1866 would allow Congress to amend CAPTA, the primary legislative framework in the United States that defines child abuse and maltreament to exclude efforts at conversion for gender minorities. However, HR 1866 is not the only federal effort. Project 2025 explicitly identifies adoption and foster care as a target of the Trump administration. From page 477:
HHS, through ACF and the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources (ASFR), should repeal the unnecessary 2016 regulation that imposes nonstatutory sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination conditions on agency grants and return to the policy of maximizing the options for placing vulnerable children in their forever homes. ACF and OCR should also survey their programs to consider whether additional waivers of HHS grant conditions—waivers the Biden Administration revoked in 2021—are needed for faith-based agencies.
Additionally, Congress should pass the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act to ensure that providers and organizations cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage.”
Backlash to HHS rules under Biden
Aside from the general explosion of anti-trans bills over the past four years, one reason for the intensification of efforts in the domains of social services stems from new Health and Human Services policies under Biden. In 2023, the Biden administration issued guidance stating that agencies and state departments of child welfare must take steps to protect LGBTQ+ youth in foster care and adoption. While the rules have since been rescinded, they received enormous pushback from conservative groups when they were proposed.
For example, the Christian Alliance for Orphans, a think tank that promotes the interests of religiously-affiliated foster care and adoption organizations lamented:
"the rule will place the force of law behind the idea that a child’s current inclinations and feelings are, and must be, the final word when it comes to questions of sexuality and gender."
CAFO opposed any program which required adults to accept LGBTQ+ youth, but moreover, opposed any program that would allow agencies and prospective parents to opt into such a program either. They argued this would create a “two tier” system, where those whose religious convictions precluded acceptance of gay and transgender youth were deemed lesser than those who opted for certification.
This was echoed by the Southern Baptist Church’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who argued that children taken away from non-affirming parents should be placed with non-affirming foster parents, and that placement in an affirming home would undermine their rights as parents. A separate organization, the Ethics and Public Policy Center told the Federalist that were this rule to stand, it would allow the state to seize children from Christian parents:
“If it’s unsafe and abuse not to affirm a child’s LGBTQI+ identity in foster care, then it would be unsafe and abuse not to affirm a child in other contexts, such as adoption and custody disputes. The dangerous precedent established by this rule will lay the groundwork for the government to take children away from their biological parents.”
The Federalist Society specifically took issue with the Administration’s explicit prohibition on conversion therapy. While they have long contended that parents should be free to send their children to sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts, they too feel that this “right” should extend to foster parents who hold temporary guardianship. This raises the serious question of whether children could be adopted for the express purpose of conversion, something which has happened in the past.
FedSoc summary of Biden guidelines
“The proposal rule specifies that use of so-called “conversion therapy” and efforts that attempt to suppress or change a child's sexual orientation or gender identity” are not safe and appropriate. It is unclear if “conversion therapy” includes talk therapy, which would raise concerns under the First Amendment.”
Biden’s rules, which were an undeniable step towards protecting queer youth in foster care have been since rescinded with the first wave of Trump’s executive orders immediately after taking office. Unsurprisingly, the rules had also been opposed almost immediately by conservative states. On November 27, 2023, this charge was lead by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall whose open letter opposing the rules was co-signed 17 other attorneys general.
Unsuprisingly, the rules were also opposed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has made targeting transgender youth a personal vendetta. Paxton — who was also a signatory on the November 2023 letter to the HHS Administration for Children and Families — sued the Biden administration in Texas v. Becerra.
On March 12, 2025, district Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle blocked the previous administration’s rules, naming a variety of factors but not the least of which was that the rule conflicted with Texas state law by preventing the state from investigating affirming parents of trans youth.
For more information on the campaign to destroy LGBTQ+ rights in adoption and foster care and child welfare, check out:
Kant, J. D., Bono, M. H., & Boskey, E. R. (2025). Legislating and adjudicating the rights of LGBTQ youth in child welfare. Journal of Social Work, in press https://doi.org/10.1177/14680173251318575
