Ohio could soon protect parents who do not “affirm” their transgender-identifying children, a major victory for parents’ rights that could reverberate across the nation.
In states like Ohio, where lawmakers have embraced radical gender ideology in the past, parents who insist on their children’s biological sex and given name risk losing custody of their kids to the state. The Affirming Families First Act would ensure that these parents could not be accused of abuse or acting “contrary to the best interest of the child” by any state agency.
“No parent should lose custody, face state intervention, or be deemed unfit simply for affirming a child’s sex,” Ohio Representative Josh Williams, the bill’s co-sponsor, told The Daily Wire. “The Affirming Families First Act restores common sense to our child-welfare and family-law systems by making clear that affirming biological sex is not abuse, neglect, or contrary to a child’s best interest — it is a protected parental right.”
The bill specifies that parents have a right to use their gender confused child’s given name and correct pronouns, and that courts should not “consider a parent’s act of affirming a child’s sex as contrary to the best interest of the child” when allocating parental responsibilities for the care of children. It also prohibits state agencies from using state funds for training, education, or programming that characterizes affirming a child’s sex as abuse or neglect.
“It’s unconscionable to think that local government entities would flag a parent as being a danger to their son for declining to buy him a dress or call ‘him,’ ‘her,’’’ Representative Gary Click, the bill’s co-sponsor, told The Daily Wire. “We will not tolerate such government overreach in the state of Ohio.”
Several states have taken action to protect the rights of parents and legally clarify that affirming a child’s sex is not abuse. Indiana Republican Governor Mike Braun signed a bill similar to the Affirming Families First Act into law in May 2025. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein received pushback from his fellow Democrats when he signed a law prohibiting child welfare services from investigating parents who affirm their children’s biological sex as a form of abuse.
Texas amended its criminal code to exclude such actions from definitions of abuse, and lawmakers in Georgia and New Hampshire have recently introduced bills seeking to protect a parent’s right to affirm their child’s sex without fear of being investigated for abuse.
Ohio has been an epicenter of radical gender-affirming child welfare policies.
The Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) was part of a federally funded, multimillion-dollar research project that aimed to transform child welfare systems with gender ideology and strong-arm parents into affirming their child’s gender confusion, according to an investigation by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cuyahoga County DCFS developed a gender affirming child welfare program called AFFIRM.ME, which included a “Safe Identification” intervention that trained social workers to collect the sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (SOGIE) data of youth who interfaced with child welfare, including children living with their parents. The data was put into a confidential spreadsheet that tracked if parents were “rejecting” or “accepting” of their child’s chosen sex, according to the Daily Caller.
The county also adopted a policy requiring state workers to have a “conversation about SOGIE” with youth ages 13-21, to ensure youth weren’t “unsafe” or “experiencing abuse or neglect because of rejection” due to their LGBTQ identity in April 2022.
“Youth in their own homes or in substitute care deserve to reside with affirming caregivers and other household members,” states the policy. “We can help ensure this by safely identifying LGBTQ2S + youth and understanding their individual needs.”
Cuyahoga County DCSF called its AFFIRM.ME program a “blueprint for Health and Human Services divisions throughout the nation to follow” in a 2022 blog post.
The Biden administration relied upon Cuyahoga County DCSF leadership when crafting a September 2023 rule that required foster care families to affirm a child’s gender confusion, and referred to the Ohio group as “trailblazers,” public record emails show.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration over the foster care regulation in September 2024, saying the rule held “the Texas foster care system hostage to force unscientific, fringe beliefs about gender upon the entire country,” in a press release. Paxton’s lawsuit was successful, and the rule was vacated in its entirety by a federal judge in June 2025.
Parents in California, Indiana, Virginia, and Maryland have had their children taken away by child welfare services for affirming their child’s sex.
Erin Lee, a Colorado mom, was investigated by CPS for continuing to affirm her 12-year-old daughter’s female sex when she began identifying as a boy after she was “secretly groomed” at school, Lee told The Daily Wire in January 2026.
“Tragically, kids have been harmed, trafficked and even died in state care after being removed from their families on these false claims of abuse. Thousands more have been denied access to loving foster families who affirm reality,” Laura Hanford, Senior Policy Analyst at the Richard and Helen Devos Center for Human Flourishing, told The Daily Wire. “There is no scientific evidence or marker for ‘gender identity,’ yet parents from coast to coast have lost their children for refusing to adopt this belief system.”
While states begin to take action to protect the rights of families to affirm biology, parental rights advocate Erin Friday told The Daily Wire that federal action is needed.
“All roads lead to sex-rejecting interventions when child welfare programs get involved with a child who is distressed about their sex,” Friday, president of the parental advocacy group Our Duty-USA, said. “The entire network of child welfare programs is being used to force parents to either subject their child to sex-rejecting intervention or lose all contact with their child.”
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