A groundbreaking new report from The Daily Caller exposes the backstory behind the Biden-Harris administration’s regulation on foster care rules for children who identify as LGBTQ, and underscores the inherent threat that transgender orthodoxy poses to the parental rights of moms and dads who reject the idea that children can be “born in the wrong body.”

In April, the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule for agencies to fully implement on or before Oct. 1, 2026. The HHS agency’s first released a version of the rule in September 2023, and updated it in response to public comment.

Katelynn Richardson and Megan Brock, writing for The Daily Caller, reported that the new rule cites federally funded research from activists at the National Center for Youth with Diverse Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression. This “SOGIE Center” itself is run by many of the same people who ran a study aimed at connecting kids who identify as LGBTQ in foster care with “affirming” caretakers.

That study, conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, received a five-year, $10 million federal grant at the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure. The researchers established the National Quality Improvement Center on Tailored Services, Placement Stability and Permanency for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Two-Spirit Children and Youth in Foster Care. That entity, “QIC-LGBTQ2S,” selected four implementation sites: Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, Cuyahoga County in Ohio, the state of Michigan, and Prince George’s County in Maryland.

According to the Daily Caller, federal officials drafting the foster care rule under Biden-Harris looked to the Cuyahoga County site as the model for infusing gender ideology into foster care and social services.

HHS officials praised the county’s “AFFIRM.ME” model, which ran in the county until 2021 and has since been implemented in other Ohio foster care programs.

The Cuyahoga County Foster Care Model

The model includes four interventions: the “Safe Identification Initiative” identifies young people as LGBTQ; the “AFFIRM Caregiver Initiative” convinces parents to support their kids’ claimed identities; the “Youth Acceptance Project” helps kids find “affirming” adults in their circles; and the “Chosen Affirming Family Finding Program” trains prospective foster parents to support LGBTQ identities and ideology.

The county told The Daily Caller that it still uses elements of the program, including the “Safe Identification Initiative” and the “Youth Acceptance Project.”

The materials developed through QIC-LGBTQ2S in Cuyahoga County now appear on the website of the SOGIE Center, which has ties to the agency behind the Biden foster care rule. The Innovations Institute at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work leads the SOGIE Center, and it pushed the Biden rule to go further. The institute urged the agency to require “affirming” placements for all children, not just those who identify as LGBTQ. It suggested requiring that staff and foster parents go through LGBTQ trainings and recommended trainings from the SOGIE Center.

The institute wrote that agencies should ask children as young as six about their gender identity, claiming that “this identity component forms as early as two-years-old.”

Ideological Takeover of Foster Care

While names such as “The Youth Acceptance Project” sound benign, the Cuyahoga County program amounts to an ideological capture of the foster care system in the name of “acceptance.”

Activists suggest that agreeing to gender ideology is merely a matter of politeness, respect, and support. Yet the claim that a boy can become a girl merely by identifying as such is rightly controversial. It stands biology, tradition, and commonsense on their heads.

Furthermore, the medical interventions activists tout as “gender-affirming care“—drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones to make males appear female and vice versa, and sterilizing surgeries—are experimental. There is no concrete evidence that this “gender-affirming care” actually improves long-term outcomes, but internal documents show that even activists who support these “treatments” acknowledged grotesque side-effects like cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the inability of children to give informed consent to drugs that will change them for the rest of their lives.

The transgender movement claims not only that males can become female and vice versa, and not only that “gender-affirming care” is medically necessary, but that opposition to those ideas is itself suspect, if not evil. The logical conclusion of changing the foster care system to promote transgender “affirmation” is the exclusion of “heretics” who dare disagree with the reigning orthodoxy.

Richardson and Brock opened their Daily Caller article with a quote from Alex Roque, who runs the Ali Forney Center for homeless young people identifying as LGBTQ in New York City. Speaking to employees at the Department of Health and Human Services last fall, Roque said, “Transphobia is child abuse.”

Roque claimed that if a mom and dad reject their child’s stated gender identity, the system should treat that “non-affirmation” as abuse. “If they were denying them food or denying them access to school or denying other things, there would be headlines,” he said. “There would be prosecution.”

Parental Rights Battles

The relentless conclusion of this twisted logic is already working itself out in areas across the country.

Maryland parents who lost custody of their autistic son after staff at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., informed them he was transgender, are suing to restore their parental rights.

According to the lawsuit, the hospital “ordered the parents to change the family’s religion and eliminate parts of the Protestant Bible while converting to the ‘new’ Christianity like that of a transgender hospital chaplain who was forced upon the family.”

As The Daily Caller noted, the child’s parents reside in one of the four locations—Prince George’s County, Maryland—where the QIC-LGBTQ2S center grant was implemented.

The Daily Caller also cited cases in Montana, California, and Ohio where the government has ripped children away from parents because those parents refuse to endorse their children’s stated transgender identities.

A Terrifying Threat

When implementing the final foster care rule, the Administration for Children and Families claimed it made a few changes to respond to critics’ concerns that the rule would undermine parental rights.

While the foster care rule set forth procedures for identifying potential placements as “safe and appropriate” for minors who identify as LGBTQ, it does not require every family in the foster care system to meet those specific “designated placement” requirements. The agency suggests that this distinction will protect foster parents who dissent from transgender orthodoxy.

The rule still represents an endorsement of transgender orthodoxy, however, and it puts the foster care system on a trajectory to alienate dissenting parents. If the system endorses the idea that boys can become girls or vice versa and that experimental sterilizing drugs are healthy for these “transgender youth,” then it follows that parents who tell their children that humans are irreversibly male or female must be anathema. It also follows that parents who want their children to grow up without experimental drugs are engaging in a form of harm, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Transgender orthodoxy is not neutral, and the government cannot endorse that ideology on the one hand and respect parents who disagree with it on the other.

Activists may don terms like “acceptance” and “affirmation” as sheepskin to dress themselves up as caring, but under these deceptive words, their ideas are ravenous wolves, aiming to push protective parents aside and prey on confused kids.

The University of Connecticut School of Social Work Innovations Institute’s demand that bureaucrats require LGBTQ affirmation for all foster parents—not just those to be matched with kids who identify as LGBTQ—is extremely revealing in this regard. According to this ideology, a loving parent must always accept a child’s claim to be “transgender,” even if that sets their child up for a lifetime of experimental alterations that will leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile.

If the Administration for Children and Families relied on the Innovations Institute’s research for the foster care rule, then it seems likely the bureaucracy will return to this bile in the future. Parents everywhere should be concerned, because if child services adopts this ideology, non-“affirming” parents won’t just be excluded from welcoming a foster child into their home—they might also find their natural children taken from them, as well.

In this Orwellian nightmare, the desire to protect your children from grotesque “treatments” would itself be proof that you are abusing your children. If the government adopts “gender-affirming care” as a litmus test for parenthood, that ideology won’t stop with foster care.