WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) has introduced legislation aimed at protecting parents from having their children removed by activist child welfare services for merely refusing to go along with transgender ideology.

On October 5, Miller announced the Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act, named after a confused 19-year-old who committed suicide in 2019 after three years of trying to live as a man after “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. 

The bill, according to the press release, would clarify in federal law that “affirming a child’s biological sex does not constitute child abuse”; forbid “federally funded state child-welfare systems from removing children from fit parents simply because those parents affirm their child’s biological sex”; “foster and adoptive families cannot be denied placement solely because they affirm a child’s biological sex”; stop states from wrongfully asserting custody using the federal Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act; and penalize offending states through both the loss of federal funds and a private right of action.

“Raising your son as a boy or your daughter as a girl is fundamental to parenthood, not child abuse,” said Miller. “The Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act defends the constitutional rights of mothers and fathers and stops bureaucrats from using taxpayer-funded child-welfare systems to tear children away from loving families.”

The bill would prevent abuses such as the case of Joseph and Arlene Kutzko, who saw their 15-year-old daughter taken away by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families after they refused to refer to her with male pronouns while her school was secretly socially “transitioning” her behind their backs. The U.S. Department of Education is currently investigating the school district involved.

Despite framing “gender transitioning” as “care,” a large body of evidence shows that the practice carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through “gender transitions” had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under “transitioning” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”

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