She Wouldn’t Call Her Daughter ‘Trans.’ The State Took Custody.

When a transgender-identifying man flashed his prosthetic breasts on the White House lawn during the Biden administration’s penultimate Pride Month celebration, many thought we had seen the high water mark of the radical gender ideology that had captured the Democrat Party.

But internal documents unearthed by The Daily Wire reveal the shocking truth. In its waning days, the Biden administration was working behind the scenes to rip children from the homes of loving parents who refused to affirm a child’s transgender identity. Today, as a different president marks the first of June without any rainbow regalia, we’re proud to bring you the first in a four-part series exposing the Biden administration’s radical anti-family plot.

We begin with the story of Nicole, a loving mother whose refusal to indulge her daughter’s gender delusions put her at odds with her local school district, and later, the entire state of Oregon. The system that empowered the state to rip Nicole’s daughter from her home is precisely the kind of system the Biden administration was developing — and likely would have implemented had Vice President Kamala Harris defeated President Donald Trump.

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Nicole was shocked when the police turned up at her front door to take her 15-year-old daughter away.

In July 2024, the Oregon Department of Human Services took the teen — called Jane Doe in filings to protect her identity — into protective custody as they investigated whether Nicole was causing Jane a “mental injury,” a form of child abuse under Oregon state law.

The issue at hand? Nicole would not “affirm” Jane’s “gender identity.”

“I asked, ‘What if I don’t let her go’?” Nicole told The Daily Wire. “Then you can be arrested,” a police officer told her.

Nicole says Jane had identified as transgender for several years — but she and her husband are Christians, who acknowledge the biological reality that you can’t change your sex. After performing its investigation, Oregon DHS sent Nicole a notice in September 2024 saying it had found the claim that she caused her daughter a “mental injury” for not affirming her transgender identity was “founded.”

“We believe you, Nicole REDACTED, are responsible for the Mental Injury of Jane Doe,” the document from Oregon DHS reads. “Your actions and statements towards Jane Doe have caused significant mental injury. The severe harm perpetrated showed a serious disregard for Jane Doe’s social and emotional well-being. Your adverse reactions to Jane Doe expressing their gender identity have caused serious harm to Jane Doe’s psychological functioning.”

Oregon defines “emotional abuse” as “any mental injury to a child that shall include only observable and substantial impairment of the child’s mental or psychological ability to function caused by cruelty to the child.”

Nicole asked Oregon DHS to review and reconsider her case. Upon review, Oregon DHS again said Nicole’s refusal to “support” Jane’s gender identity had caused her a “mental injury.”

“The decision was based on the following: You refuse to support JANE DOE’s gender identity and instead provided hours-long lectures that have led to JANE DOE experiencing panic attacks and suicidal ideation. Your actions and behaviors have caused a severe negative impact on JANE DOE’s wellbeing,” states a document reviewed by The Daily Wire.

The Daily Wire reached out to Oregon DHS, asking if it could confirm whether the state of Oregon views not affirming a child’s gender identity as emotional abuse that causes mental injury to a child. Oregon DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Nicole told The Daily Wire that Jane now lives with her gender-affirming father.

“Because I tell them she’s a girl and I won’t say that she’s a boy whatsoever, they won’t let me have a relationship with my daughter,” Nicole told The Daily Wire. “They took all of my parenting rights away.”

“Nicole’s story is not unusual,” parents’ rights advocate Erin Friday says. “Gender confused kids are being groomed by adults to use the child welfare apparatus to escape from the only parent who truly has the child’s best interest in mind. The system that was designed to safeguard kids has morphed into a lethal weapon against loving parents.”

Nicole is now going to court to clear the names of her and her husband, who was also named as having “founded” charges of emotional abuse. Her case is set to go before a judge in September 2026.

“I gave birth to a beautiful, loving little girl, and that she will always and forever, no matter what she does to her body, will be a girl,” Nicole told The Daily Wire.

“Now my husband and I are in a battle with the State to clear our names because we didn’t lie to our daughter and tell her that she is a boy. This has cost us thousands [of dollars] and more heartache that I can’t begin to place into words, and with no end in sight.”

Oregon’s Radical Child Welfare Policies

Oregon is known for its radical embrace of gender ideology. It adopted a groundbreaking policy in 2018 requiring child foster care parents and adoptive families to “respect, accept, and support” a child’s gender identity. “Gender identity” is a term used by transgender activists to describe a person’s feelings about their sex. Activists view not “affirming” a child’s gender identity as a form of abuse and neglect.

This rule shares similarities with a now rescinded Biden-era federal regulation that required all foster care families to provide transgender affirming environments for LGBTQ+ youth.

Jessica Bates, a Christian Oregon mom, sued Oregon DHS in 2023 after she was barred from applying to adopt children because of “her objections to affirming a child’s transgender identity,” legal documents show. Bates, who was represented by legal counsel from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), initially lost her case but won on appeal and received a preliminary injunction in July 2025 allowing her to move forward with foster and adoption processes.

“This was really the first appellate circuit court decision ever to address this issue, and we think it reads very strongly in favor of free speech and religious liberty,” Jon Scruggs, ADF VP of Litigation Strategy, told The Daily Wire.

“Just because someone refuses to affirm gender ideology, you can’t deny their ability to foster and adopt. And if that’s true, I think it certainly flows into biological parents as well, that if anything, biological parents have even stronger rights and adoption applicants.”

The Oregon DHS Resource and Adoptive Family Training (RAFT) for foster and adoptive families has a session devoted to training caregivers to create “affirming homes.”

“You will learn about what it means to affirm (respecting, accepting, and supporting) children’s identities and practice affirmation in the resource home,” the training states.

The training makes clear that parents and caregivers must actively affirm a child’s gender identity by using “correct pronouns” and ensuring a child has clothes that match their chosen sex.

In the final opinion in Bates’s case, the judge noted that Oregon trained foster and adoptive parents to not only be tolerant of a child’s gender identity, but also to proactively be affirming.

“The state’s own denial of Bates’s application shows that the state does not interpret its policy and the RAFT guidelines to be merely advisory. The state thus cited Bates’s refusal to ‘encourage’ children ‘in this behavior’ as grounds for denying her certification as an adoptive parent,” states the opinion.

Non-Affirmation Is Abuse

Oregon’s child welfare policies aren’t limited to the foster care and adoption system. They also affect children residing at home with their parents.

“The logic of the state’s argument in the foster context is parents are endangering children’s lives by refusing to affirm gender ideology,” Scruggs told The Daily Wire.

“That logic crosses right over to biological parents and so that’s one reason we’re litigating this issue across the country.”

ADF is providing legal counsel to foster and adoptive parents across the country who are being discriminated against for not affirming gender ideology.

In October 2023, Oregon DHS received a “call of concern” about Jane’s safety while under Nicole’s care. An Oregon DHS report written by a caseworker, reviewed by The Daily Wire, noted Jane was “currently wanting to transition from female to male” and that Nicole was “not supportive of this.” The caseworker pointed out that Nicole and her husband believe “men are men and women are women.”

Jane had continued to identify as a boy, and in May 2024, out of concern for her well-being, Nicole asked Jane to watch videos showing the harms of gender ideology.

Nicole told The Daily Wire that she and Jane spent around two hours watching the videos, ate dinner, and went to bed. The evening seemed uneventful.

The next morning, Jane headed off to her public school. But when Nicole went to pick up Jane at the end of the day, she was nowhere to be found. Nicole spent almost two hours frantically trying to locate her and called 911 to report her daughter as missing. She was directed to a police officer, who said Jane went home with a friend because she felt threatened by the gender ideology videos Nicole had shown her the night before.

The police officer brought Jane to Nicole, with the order that she take her daughter to an emergency crisis center. At the center, counselors offered Nicole pamphlets about resources for LGBTQ+ community members, which she refused.

The Oregon Department of Education, in January 2023, released a 48-page document titled “Supporting Gender Expansive Students: Guidance for Schools,” which provides practical ways for schools to be gender affirming. The department provides a template to help school staff create gender identity support plans and recommends that school staff keep secrets about students’ “gender identity.”

So, while Nicole and her husband tried to reason with Jane at home, the teenager’s school had been providing her with information about LGBTQ+ identities. Her teachers were calling her by a different name, and her peers pressured her into transitioning to another sex.

Nicole told The Daily Wire that “schools, outside counselors, children’s friends, phones, echo chambers within social media, and affirming family members” all influenced Jane’s embrace of a transgender identity.

Nicole believed that in June 2024, Jane was starting to see some of the harms of transgenderism. But this change of heart was short-lived, which Nicole believes was due, in part, to the influence of a Christian counselor Jane was seeing for help addressing her underlying struggles.

The counselor advertised herself as having a “Christian worldview,” and Nicole specifically asked the counselor not to discuss LGBTQ+ issues with Jane.

The Daily Wire reviewed a document that suggests the Christian counselor supported Jane’s transgender identity and told Oregon DHS their “main concern is the parents have really particular beliefs about LGBTQ,” and told a caseworker “mom had the perception that since she is listed as a Christian counselor, that she would be against the LGBTQ,” according to an Oregon DHS report.

When Jane used her tablet to access an online “gender support group,” the Christian counselor was “really proud of Jane for reaching out to somebody when she felt she needed help,” according to the report.

Nicole told The Daily Wire the counselor’s office was “where a lot of issues occurred.”

After Jane was taken into state custody in July 2024, the Department of Human Services sent letters to Nicole’s family members, alerting them that Jane needed a place to live. Gender-affirming child welfare systems seek to find “chosen affirming families” for transgender identifying children whose parents refuse to transition them to another sex. Nicole told The Daily Wire that this action was devastating, isolating, and harmed her familial relationships.

“CPS sent letters to my entire family saying, ‘Are you willing to take Nicole’s daughter,’ because, basically — she’s unfit,” Nicole told The Daily Wire.

It’s been almost two years since CPS showed up at her door in July 2024. That was the last time Nicole saw her daughter.

“We lost her to the State when she was fifteen, along with all of my parenting rights,” Nicole told The Daily Wire. “We just want to bring awareness out there to parents everywhere that this is happening.”