Parents Who Treat Boys as Boys and Girls as Girls Are Not Abusers, New Bill Declares

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., introduced a bill Tuesday aiming to prevent child welfare agencies from treating a parent’s refusal to “affirm” a child’s stated transgender identity as child abuse.

“The Left’s radical gender ideology is harming children with irreversible treatments and procedures, but in blue states, parents are being punished, and sometimes even separated from their children, for protecting their kids from this permanent damage,” Schmitt told the Daily Signal in a statement on the bill Tuesday.

“It is sickening that a state would impose ideological child-welfare policies to tear apart a family,” he added. “Parents know what’s best for their own families, and we need to defend their rights to protect their children.”

The Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act takes its name from Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old girl who took her own life three years after the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services took custody away from her mother, Abby. Her mother refused to “affirm” Yaeli’s transgender identity as male. The department had said that keeping Yaeli out of her mother’s home would decrease her chances of committing suicide.

The bill seeks to prevent states from removing children from their parents or otherwise penalizing families based on a parent’s refusal to support social or medical gender transition. For example, Oregon’s Department of Human Services concluded that Nicole Calaway, a Christian mom, had caused “mental injury” to her daughter by refusing to “affirm” her transgender identity.

The bill would prevent federally funded child welfare programs from treating affirmation of biological sex as abuse, conditioning federal child welfare spending on compliance with these protections. It would also create a private right of action, allowing parents to sue if state actors violate those protections.

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“The Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act would be an absolute game-changer for families,” Laura Hanford, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “They would finally have protection from being torn apart by gender activists in state child protection systems.”

Hanford warned that child protection systems have been captured by transgender ideology.

“It’s like the ‘Twilight Zone’—loving parents are accused of abuse or neglect simply for affirming the reality of their child’s sex and trying to protect their vulnerable gender-confused child from toxic drugs or destructive surgeries,” she said. “Currently, these parents are at the mercy of social workers and judges who are trained to view them as abusive and can drag proceedings out for years, even when parents are cleared of spurious abuse charges.”

“Parents should never fear losing custody of their children because they recognize biological reality,” Chip Wyatt, government relations director at Heritage Action, told the Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday.

“Senator Schmitt’s Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act addresses disturbing abuses of government power at the behest of gender ideologues,” Wyatt added. “Congress must protect parental rights and ensure federal taxpayer dollars don’t punish families for refusing to participate in sex-rejecting ideology.”

Hanford argued that the bill would not change a state’s ability to intervene in real cases of abuse. Instead, it “just takes off the table entirely the fictitious premise that it’s abuse to raise a girl as a girl or a boy as a boy.”