(LifeSiteNews) — According to a chilling October 24 report by Megan Brock of The Daily Signal, the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services, an Ohio child welfare agency, created a so-called “confidential spreadsheet” that tracked “the sexual orientation and transgender identity of children as young as five.” The report, which details a document obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, highlights the extent to which some government agencies tasked with the protection of children have been captured by trans activists:
The Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services created a database tracking the sexual orientation, transgender identity, and pronouns of children who interacted with the child welfare system in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, featuring entries dated from March 2018 to the most recent entry in August 2024. The spreadsheet was part of its “Safe Identification” program, which teaches social services staff how to collect information about the sexuality and gender identity of children.
The Daily Caller noted that the Cuyahoga County DCFS was one of four social service agencies in the United States “chosen to research, develop, and evaluate transgender ideology-based child welfare interventions that suggest parents and caregivers who do not affirm a child’s sexual orientation or gender confusion are unsafe and may need to have their children removed from their home.”
As shocking as that may sound, removing children from the homes of parents who do not want them to undergo life-changing drug regimens and surgeries is already standard policy in many places.
In 2023, California passed bill A.B. 957, the “Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Intersex Youth Empowerment Act,” which would treat parental refusal to “affirm” their child’s gender confusion as a violation of health, safety, and welfare in any custody disputes. The new law requires judges overseeing custody battles to favor the parent who “affirms” the child’s “gender identity”; the law specifically defines “the health, safety, and welfare” of a child as including “a parent’s affirmation of a child’s gender identity.”
In fact, wherever gender ideology is accepted as fact by legal authorities, parents run the risk of having their children taken from their homes if they do not agree to “transition” them. In Canada, the National Post reported recently that an Ontario school repeatedly called Child Services on parents who did not want to “transition” their daughter – because they wanted her to maintain her healthy body.
Courts have also intervened when parents do not want their children to transition, asserting that sex change treatments are a right and that to deny them is transphobic. In 2019, the U.K. Daily Mail reported that multiple children had been removed from the parental home for the same reason.
This is precisely why many people are simply leaving jurisdictions where the state is willing to enforce gender ideology. The Substack newsletter “Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans” regularly posts such stories, and a recent column titled “Eastern European Mom” caught my eye. It is written by an Eastern European immigrant to the United States who discovered that her 13-year-old daughter had gone through a “mental meltdown.” She was hospitalized and while in the hospital stated that she was a boy. Her mother decided to do the only thing she could when she realized that every single institution supported a sex change for her daughter:
I subsequently learned that my daughter’s public middle school had socially transitioned her behind my back. Alarmed at this plot to take my child away, I immediately made plans to return to Eastern Europe. I located a school back home near my family for both of my children. I contacted the school director, explained the situation and was assured that they would not affirm and that they would work with me no matter what struggles my daughter has. So, I sent both kids to Eastern Europe to stay with family and I followed a few weeks later after making arrangements to work remotely.
When I returned to Eastern Europe, I opened up to my very large family about what had happened with my daughter. As opposed to many of the stories I’ve heard about with US families, where family members are quick to affirm regardless of what the parents see as being in the children’s best interest, my family was shocked. They asked how they could jump in to help my daughter’s distress and mental health struggles. They were also appalled by the gender ideology and their interference in family affairs. Rightfully, they were shocked that the school in the U.S. could assume such a major responsibility for someone’s child’s future and health.
My daughter never disclosed her trans identity to the family our whole time in Eastern Europe.
As a family, we supported my daughter by lavishing her with attention and praise, especially for her beauty. Eastern Europeans are not ones to gush, so this was not natural, but we all praised, all the time, and then we did it again and again and again. Every day we would start with the simple statement “You’re such a beautiful girl”! We praised her general beauty, we praised her nose, her chin, her eyes, her smile, her hair, her neck. We also implemented a whole schedule to make sure she was never alone and without family. We organized endless family dinners, gatherings, and celebrations. At every gathering one of us would say “You’re such a beautiful girl”. And she obviously is – my daughter is perfect in every single possible way. My daughter is a wonder.
I was struck repeatedly and still nearly cry when I pause to think about the doctors who were ready to swoop in and mutilate my beautiful daughter. I still have nightmares of her walking up to me, as an adult, with her breasts cut off, with a deep wound in her arms, with hair on her pretty delicate face, asking why I allowed the doctors to mutilate her.
Eventually, mother and family returned to the United States, and her daughter is being sent to a private Catholic school and now identifies, happily, as a girl. But parents must recognize – as this mother now does – that most educational and medical institutions actually pose a real physical and mental danger to their children.