Biden’s Transgender Shock Troops Had A History Of Radicalizing Child Welfare Systems

This is part four of a Daily Wire series exposing the Biden administration’s previously unreported efforts to enact radical anti-family policies in the name of protecting transgender-identifying children. In part three, we saw how Biden officials prepared for a second term by laying the groundwork to enshrine transgenderism in federal law. Today, we meet the radical activists who would have led this effort.

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When the Biden administration needed people to implement its radical transgender policies, there was an obvious place to look.

The University of Connecticut’s National Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression (SOGIE) Center was named a subcontractor of the $20 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create Biden’s own Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression Institute.

Names were not the only thing the two SOGIE Institutes would have in common. The UConn group was at the forefront of pushing radical gender ideology on child welfare systems across the country, and the activists and researchers behind the group would have assisted the HHS’s Children’s Bureau in “transforming” child welfare systems with gender ideology and implementing Biden’s April 2024 rule requiring foster care parents to “affirm” a child’s “gender identity.”

The primary contractor of the SOGIE Institute grant, BLH Technologies Inc., was described as UConn’s “small business partner” in an email written by Angela Weeks, a University of Connecticut employee tasked with administering the SOGIE grant.

“I have exciting news! BLH Technologies Inc, our small business partner in the application for the Child Welfare SOGIE Institute, received notification that we won the award!” wrote Weeks. “This [Technical Assistance] center will provide guidance for child welfare agencies across the country on SOGI data collection, program implementation, and the implementation of the ‘Designated Placements Rule.'”

Weeks and Marlene Matarese, who held leadership roles at Biden’s SOGIE Institute, had spent years working together to develop gender-affirming child welfare programs through an initiative called the National Quality Improvement Center on Tailored Services, Placement Stability, and Permanency for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Two-Spirit Children and Youth (QIC-LGBTQ2S) in Foster Care. This group was funded by a $10 million federal grant awarded to the University of Maryland School of Social Work in late 2016. The initiative developed “affirming” programs that re-educated parents to support a child’s gender transition, helped LGBTQ+ identifying kids find “chosen affirming families,” and trained social workers to collect information about the sexuality of children.

Weeks, Matarese, and the research group moved from the University of Maryland in late 2022 to become part of UConn’s School of Social Work Innovations Institute. Matarese is currently an associate research professor at UConn, while Weeks is an administrative program manager, and both used UConn email addresses to perform SOGIE Institute tasks. Many of the documents cited in this series were obtained through public record requests submitted to the university.

UConn was awarded a $33,700 grant in April 2023 to create a series of training modules for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) staff to build its capacity to “serve and provide support to LGBTQ2SI+ children, families, parents, and others,” as described in the grant.

Matarese and Weeks worked with ACF officials to complete the training series in the summer of 2024, records show. One email shows Weeks explaining the concept of “sex assigned at birth” to an ACF staff member.

“My questions is are people also assigning gender at birth? As do birth certificates have ‘gender’ instead of sex? I defer to UCONN on this point,” asked the staff member.

“We use both, depending on the context,” Weeks responded. “Sex assigned at birth is when folks add female/male to birth certificates. When people say, ‘it’s a girl’ or ‘it’s a boy,’ they are assigning gender.”

UConn was also home to the National SOGIE Center, a collaborative of transgender activist groups led by Weeks and Matarese that showcased many of the interventions developed by QIC-LGBTQ2S. UConn described the National SOGIE Center as “A collaborative, led by Innovations Institute with Angela Weeks as Project Director and Marlene Matarese as Principal Investigator, of national leading social justice organizations that work to promote the well-being of LGBTQ+ youth and their families,” on its website, which has since been deactivated but is available to read on the Internet Archive.

The Innovations Institute removed links to many LGBTQ+ affirming resources and the National SOGIE Center from its website after President Trump took office, and it’s unclear if UCONN is still leading the group. The Daily Wire contacted UConn several times and asked for clarification about its current involvement but did not receive a response.

The National SOGIE Center continues to produce LGBTQ+ affirming resources. It published a “Coming Out With Care” guidebook in the fall of 2025 that helps young people navigate sharing their LGBTQ+ identity. The guide warns you “may lose family members” who have been exposed to “misinformation” when sharing your LGBTQ+ identity.

“Try to remind yourself that your parents and other family members may have been exposed to a lot of misinformation about sexual orientation and gender identity,” states the guide. “You may lose family members — this could be for a few days, weeks, months, or even years.”

The guide also recommends that youth research local consent laws to discover if they can make “medical decisions’ without parental consent.

“Research if there is an age of consent law that lets youth (in some states, this may be between ages 12 to 18) make certain medical decisions without parental consent,” the guide says.

A recently uploaded video on the National SOGIE Center YouTube channel stressed the importance of parents supporting their child’s transgender identity. The video pushes the debunked narrative that affirming a child’s transgender identity protects them from harm.

In 2025, the Human Rights Campaign, a longtime partner of the National SOGIE Center, announced it was transitioning its child welfare program to the National SOGIE Center in its May 2025 Newsletter.

“We are excited to share an important update: after May 30, 2025, the management of the All Children – All Families (ACAF) program is transitioning from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation to The National SOGIE Center!” stated the newsletter. “This transition marks a new chapter in the program’s evolution, one grounded in continuity, deep expertise, and our shared commitment to advancing equity and inclusion for LGBTQ+ children, youth, and families.”

PART ONE: SHE WOULDN’T CALL HER DAUGHTER ‘TRANS.’ THE STATE TOOK CUSTODY.

PART TWO: THE EVIDENCE PROBLEM AT THE HEART OF BIDEN’S TRANS RULE

PART THREE: THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S CLANDESTINE 5-YEAR PLAN TO TRANS CHILD WELFARE