June 1, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has instituted sweeping changes to its policies and procedures in caring for children who experience gender dysphoria that essentially weed out all employees and volunteers who cannot in good conscience support and promote transgender ideology.

Illinois now "requires that all LGBTQ children and youth be placed in an affirming safe housing, receive LGBTQ competent medical and mental health services, and have equal opportunity and access to care."

However, in order to assure consistent achievement of that goal, the new policy requires "any person who is involved with DCFS children/youth will complete mandatory training in LGBTQ competency." This will be an integral part of DCFS core training and will be a requirement to attaining a child-welfare license.

Purging t ransgenderism’s non-believers

According to attorney Mary Hasson, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C, “The new DCFS policies are less about safety and well being and more about using state power to ‘overrule’ basic, empirical (and common sense) truths about human beings and to replace them with ideological assertions that validate adult feelings rather than benefit children.”

The revised procedures command, "In no instance should LGBTQ children/youth be placed with a non-affirming caregiver who is opposed to sexual orientations that differ from the caregiver's own. Nor should LGBTQ children and youth be placed with caregivers who are unwilling/unable to support children and youth whose gender identity or gender expression differs from traditional expectation.”

The revision goes further, insisting that “The child/youth's chosen name and preferred gender pronoun (including gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘they’ or ‘ze/hir’) must be respected.”

Guided by left forces

The new procedures and standards were created under the guidance of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois (ACLU), Pride Action Tank and other pro-gay and transgender organizations. While the ACLU had sought, but was not granted, the right to review the final version of the policy revisions, the progressive rights group said it was “pleased that DCFS incorporated nearly all of the changes requested by the ACLU.”

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council observes that, “While this portrays itself as being based in science, it is 100 percent ideological.”

Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute agrees. “There is no research proving that children are best served by having gender dysphoria affirmed. Quite the contrary, the best research to date suggests that if gender dysphoria is not affirmed in young children, it diminishes over time,” she explained. “Does the DCFS believe it’s better for children to endure castration or double mastectomies, a lifetime of cross-sex hormone-doping with its unknown health risks, and social struggles than to accept their immutable sex?

In a landmark report published last year, authors Lawrence S. Mayer, M.B., M.S., Ph.D., scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University, and Paul R. McHugh, M.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found that only a minority of children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood. There is no evidence that all such children should be encouraged to become transgender, much less subjected to hormone treatments or surgery.

Mayer and McHugh added, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents, although some children may have improved psychological well-being if they are encouraged and supported in their cross-gender identification. There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.”

Discrimination Over Diversity and Care

Beyond being harmful policy, the new directive is, according to Sprigg, “Discriminatory against anyone with traditional moral values, in particular, Christians” and “will hurt children” by limiting available resources.

Illinois Family Institute’s Higgins added, “Denying people of ... faith the opportunity to foster or adopt children constitutes the antithesis of a commitment to diversity and puts the lie to DCFS’s claim to care about the needs of children. The number of available foster and adoptive families will decrease.”

The revised procedures will have “a chilling effect on DCFS staff, volunteers, foster parents, and others whose ‘speech and behavior’ will be monitored and evaluated according to ideological criteria by the state of Illinois,” Hasson said.

She continued, “Forget the democratic process. Forget free speech, freedom of religion, and the conscience rights of American citizens. Forget the welfare of vulnerable children. The state of Illinois heels to the commands of LGBTQ activists; it has embraced a new creed based on the LGBTQ vision of the human person. The only winners are progressive activists and lawyers eager to fill their litigation dockets. The losers? Illinois’ most vulnerable children.”