Findings

Congress finds as follows: (1) Parents have the fundamental right under the Constitution of the United States to direct the care, upbringing, education, and welfare of their children, including raising, treating, caring for, and referring to a child in a manner consistent with the child’s sex. (2) Parents have the fundamental right to make health care decisions for the purpose of protecting their child’s bodily integrity, development, and emotional and mental health. (3) Parents have a right under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to direct the religious upbringing of their children, including to inculcate the belief that all humans are created male or female and to raise their child as the child's sex in accordance with their religious beliefs. (4) No child should be removed from his or her family by the State, or denied foster or adoptive placement, for the purpose of subjecting the child to social, medical, or surgical sex-rejecting interventions by the State. (5) Raising a child according to his or her sex is not abuse. (6) Congress and the Supreme Court have long recognized that parents possess the fundamental right to raise their children in accordance with their beliefs, including through Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), Quilloin v. Walcott, 434 U.S. 246 (1978), Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584 (1979), Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000), and Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U.S. 522 (2025). The Supreme Court, in Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000), held that the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children—is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court. (7) The right of parents to direct the upbringing and care of their children, including the right to make medical decisions on behalf of their children, is a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, including through Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584 (1979), and Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000). (8) The Supreme Court has recognized that these constitutional protections rest on the presumption that parents love their children and possess what a child lacks in maturity, experience, and capacity for judgment. The Supreme Court, in Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584 (1979), affirmed that parents have always been presumed to act in the best interests of their children in making medical decisions. (9) The Supreme Court has stated, in Quilloin v. Walcott, 434 U.S. 246 (1978), that, absent a clear and convincing finding of unfitness of parental abuse, neglect, or abandonment, the State may not lawfully intervene in the parent-child relationship. The Supreme Court has held that— (A) the Due Process Clause does not permit a State to infringe on the fundamental right of parents to make child rearing decisions simply because a state judge believes a better decision could be made (Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000)); and (B) [s]imply because the decision of a parent is not agreeable to a child or because it involves risks does not automatically transfer the power to make that decision from the parents to some agency or officer of the state (Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584 (1979)). (10) A parent’s decision to affirm a child’s sex and protect him or her from the harms of sex-rejecting interventions is an exercise of fundamental parental rights. Raising a child according to his or her sex is not abuse, neglect, or maltreatment. (11) The Supreme Court has recognized in United States v. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. 495 (2025) that sex-rejecting interventions are not settled science, that the gender distress of a child is not immutable, and that the state may reasonably protect a child from the harms of sex-rejecting interventions. Likewise, parents have the right to make a reasonable choice in the best interest of their child, to preserve for that child a future free from these harms. (12) The Supreme Court has recognized in Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U.S. 522 (2025), the rights of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children and that those rights are violated by government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children, including where promotion of gender ideology would impose a substantial burden on their religious beliefs. (13) And yet, parents across the United States have suffered grievous interference with their constitutional rights. State child protection agencies and courts have intervened forcefully to remove children from fit parents and deny placement of children with foster and adoptive parents simply because parents refuse to affirm a child’s rejection of his or her sex, or consent to social, medical or surgical sex-rejecting interventions. (14) State and Federal policies that require parental affirmation of a child’s rejection of his or her sex are at odds with the best available science, which recognizes the evidence for sex-rejecting interventions is weak while the risks of physical and psychological harm are high. This unfavorable risk-benefit ratio has been clearly established in the 2025 report of the Department of Health and Human Services, titled Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices, and through multiple systematic reviews conducted in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and other countries. Risks include cancer, loss of bone density, impaired cognitive development, adverse psychiatric events, loss of sexual function, and infertility and sterility. (15) The scientific literature shows that, in most children, gender dysphoria resolves by adulthood if the child is not medicalized or treated as the opposite sex. Affirmation of a child’s sex is consistent with both long-term health outcomes and the child’s natural developmental trajectory. (16) Federal funds should not be used to mandate, promote, or implement protocols treating sex-rejecting interventions as evidence-based, safe, or in the best interests of children. (17) Despite the lack of evidence for sex-rejecting interventions, for many years, State child welfare systems have trained personnel, from social workers to judges, to treat as unsafe or abusive parents who decline to consent to these interventions for their child. (18) This training has resulted in States removing children from loving families and denying the placement of children with prospective foster and adoptive parents, on the sole or primary basis that they affirm the child’s sex. (19) Removal from fit parents is contrary to the best interests of children, creates trauma for the child, damages familial bonds, and exposes the child to well-documented risks in state custody. Children have suffered great harm and even have died after being removed from loving families by the state for sex-rejecting interventions. (20) Where States have banned placement with foster and adoptive parents on the grounds of their scientific or religious convictions about sexuality, thousands of safe and welcoming homes have been lost to the foster system, further endangering children in desperate need. (21) Children in foster care and State residential settings are among the most vulnerable populations in the Nation; many have experienced prior abuse or trauma. Sex-separated facilities provide an essential safeguard for these children’s safety and well-being, and yet many State foster facilities now house minor females with males. (22) Many States have passed laws or enacted policies arrogating custody to themselves if a child runs to or is taken by an adult to the State for sex-rejecting interventions in gross disregard of lawful custody orders and parental rights in another State. (23) These measures amount to State-sanctioned kidnapping and directly conflict with the Full Faith and Credit Clause and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution of the United States and the amendments made by the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of 1980 (Public Law 96–611; 94 Stat. 3568). (24) State policies offering free sex-rejecting interventions to children have enticed many children to run away from fit and loving parents who seek to protect them. Nonprofit entities, including State and Federal-funded entities, have encouraged and aided children in running away to avoid the lawful authority and care of their parents. (25) Federal funds provided under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (42 U.S.C. 5101 et seq.) and subtitles B and E of title IV of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 601 et seq.) have been used, directly or indirectly, to fund investigations, removals, trainings, and programs that treat parental affirmation of a child’s sex as evidence of child abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, or parental unfitness or incapacity. (26) Such uses of Federal funds are inconsistent with Federal law, interstate compacts on juvenile runaways, multi-State laws governing court jurisdiction over child custody matters, the constitutional rights of parents, and the best interests of children. (27) The Federal child welfare system is premised on the principle that child removal from parents is an extreme measure of last resort, to be employed only when the child faces a genuine risk of abuse or neglect that cannot be remediated through less drastic means. Employing that system to remove children from parents who are exercising their fundamental constitutional right to raise their children in a manner consistent with their sex distorts the purpose of the system, causes serious harm to families, and undermines public confidence in child welfare institutions. (28) Parents and children have suffered unwarranted but irreparable harm when their own or another State has wrongfully asserted authority over the child in order to provide sex-rejecting interventions against the parent’s will. (29) Existing State remedies and administrative processes have failed to provide timely or effective relief for violations of fundamental parental rights by public officials or private entities exercising State-derived authority. Child welfare systems and courts have compounded these violations by drawing out proceedings past the age of majority, rendering cases moot and injustice permanent. (30) Congress must act to prevent the ongoing misuse of public funds, harm to children in State care, and destruction of families by the ideological weaponization child welfare systems. Clear national standards for the use of Federal child welfare funds, public accountability, and the establishment of a clear cause of action against State child welfare services and their employees and contractors are necessary to deter harm to children and violations of parental rights and to ensure meaningful remedies.