Several states are using child-welfare systems and custody laws to separate families when parents decline to affirm a child’s “transgender” identity, two authors of a Feb. 27 Wall Street Journal opinion column argue, in a trend they say is “horrifying.”
Sage Blair’s case
In the piece, Laura Bryant Hanford of the Heritage Foundation and attorney Erin Friday recount the case of a Virginia teen whose story President Donald Trump referenced during his State of the Union address.
Sage Blair, who is now 19, was 14 when her Virginia high school socially “transitioned” her without informing her adoptive mother, Michele Blair.
According to the op-ed, Sage was a high school freshman when she declared she was a boy. The authors write that a school counselor directed her to use the boys’ bathroom, where she was assaulted. After the incident, she made what they describe as a “hyperbolic statement” that “all the boys are rapists.” Police and school officials later met with Sage without her parents and warned she could be sued over that remark. Later, Sage, fearing harm to her family, ran away and was later kidnapped by a sex trafficker.
When the FBI located her in Maryland, a judge denied her parents contact and withheld custody on allegations of abuse tied to “misgendering,” the authors say. Sage was placed in a group home for male teens. She ran away again and was later found by Texas law enforcement and returned to her mother.
The authors quote Sage as later saying of her decision to identify as a boy: “Everybody was doing it. I just wanted to have friends.”
Hanford and Friday contend that “the child-welfare system has been hijacked through federally and state-funded programs to classify parents as abusive if they don’t accept their children’s assertions that they are members of the opposite sex.”
Some states have codified such standards into law, they write, citing Washington state legislation that allows minors 13 and older to leave home if they are seeking gender-related medical interventions and Colorado proposals that would direct courts to favor a parent who “affirms” a child’s transgender identity in custody disputes.
Custody losses and state gender-identity laws
The column also references cases in Connecticut, California, Oregon, and Washington state in which parents were investigated or temporarily lost custody after declining to affirm a child’s “transgender identity.” In one Connecticut case, the authors write that a teenager died by suicide after beginning testosterone treatment and in another that a girl with “severe psychiatric co-morbidities” was placed with an “affirming” couple.
Pointing to those cases, the authors include comments from Vernadette Broyles, whom they identify as Sage’s lawyer, criticizing how child-welfare proceedings are handled.
“Confidentiality requirements governing child-welfare proceedings conceal the full extent to which the child welfare apparatus is being used to investigate, coerce and separate children from their parents who decline to affirm their children’s rejection of their sex,” Broyles said.
The authors argue that some states, including Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana, have enacted laws clarifying that raising a child consistent with his or her biological sex does not constitute child abuse. They add that lawmakers in Ohio, Georgia, and New Hampshire are considering similar measures, while Democrats in Virginia and California have declined to advance related proposals.
The column concludes that Trump’s recognition of the Blair family signals that the federal government may scrutinize how child-welfare systems address disputes over gender identity and parental rights.
“Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will,” Trump said in his address to Congress.
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