The tide is turning on gender ideology, but some parents are still paying the price

Jessica Bates, the widowed Oregon mother of five who was denied the chance to adopt after telling state trainers she would not affirm a hypothetical child's gender transition, got her answer this week.  

After three years of litigation, the Oregon Department of Human Services has agreed to reinstate her adoption application and stop treating her Christian beliefs about sex as grounds for disqualification.

The state will pay her legal fees. It can no longer bar her from adoption because she believes a boy cannot become a girl or force her to use pronouns that contradict a child's biological sex. Three years ago, an Oregon caseworker told Bates she was ineligible because of her “objections to affirming a child's transgender identity.”

Today that objection is no longer disqualifying. 

I filed an amicus brief in Bates v. Pakeresht on behalf of four foster and adoptive parents who understood what was at stake. One had fostered and adopted three sisters in Minnesota. In a powerful video, she shared that no one had bothered to ask her what she actually believed before nearly disqualifying her family based on assumptions about her Christian faith. Another, who with her late husband had adopted 14 children and fostered 12 more over five decades, warned that Oregon's ideological litmus test would cost vulnerable children good homes while nearly 400,000 kids nationwide are waiting for one. 

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in significant part last July, ruling that Oregon's demand for ideological “assurances” from prospective parents likely violated both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses. This week's settlement ends the case. It is a legal vindication, not just for Bates but for any prospective parent whose convictions hold that a child's sex is not a matter of preference. 

It comes alongside a broader shift in federal policy. The Trump administration has rescinded the Biden-era rule that would have conditioned federal foster care funding on states certifying that placements affirm a child's self-declared gender identity or sexual orientation. After years in which case workers were trained to treat traditional beliefs about sex as a presumptive threat to a child's wellbeing, federal policy has swung back toward the simpler premise that love and stability matter more than ideological compliance.  

But read the news out of Massachusetts and the story is different. Catholic parents Joseph and Arlene Kutzko have not spoken to their 17-year old daughter Sophie since the state's Department of Children and Families took custody of her in December 2024.

A counselor at her public high school began socially transitioning Sopia with a new name and pronouns without telling her parents. When the Kutzkos objected on religious grounds, the counselor reported them to DCF for emotional abuse. 

Within weeks, a juvenile court judge granted the state custody. A physical abuse allegation against Mr. Kutzko was later declared unfounded. But that made no difference. A permanent restraining order still bars the family from any contact with Sophie, and DCF has moved to authorize high-dose testosterone over their objection, blocked only by a temporary court order ahead of an October 29 hearing. 

The Supreme Court has now also agreed to hear a challenge to Washington's law governing runaway minors who identify as trans. The case, International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson, asks whether parents have standing to challenge laws that displace their decision-making role over gender transitions of their children; oral argument is scheduled for December 7. 

Set these cases in a row and a pattern emerges. In Oregon, the state told a mother that her belief about biological sex disqualified her from ever bringing a child into her home. In Massachusetts, a family holding the identical belief had their daughter removed from a home she had lived in for 15 years. In Washington state, familial ties for troubled youth are severed by the state. Each rests on the idea that a parent’s potential unwillingness to betray biological reality is evidence of harm to the child. 

That is the cautionary tale about the status of gender ideology in America today. A settlement in Oregon and a rule rescission in Washington, D.C. do not retrain the caseworkers, school counselors and family court judges who spent recent years absorbing the erroneous lesson that affirmation is care and dissent is danger.

Sophie Kutzko’s case did not arise under some rogue policy awaiting a lawsuit. It arose under ordinary child-welfare procedure, applied by people who believed they were protecting a child from her own parents. Nothing in the Bates settlement touches that machinery in Massachusetts, Washington state or anywhere it still operates. Federal rulemaking can be undone by the next administration. A presumption built into our social-work system does not disappear entirely once a regulation is rescinded. 

The tide has turned, but tides go back out. Absent sustained legal pressure, case by case and state by state, the gains we see could become a brief interval in which the law caught up to reality before swinging back the other way.