Trans advocates have expressed their disgust at Donald Trump’s recent proclamation recognizing National Child Abuse Prevention Month, which he used to denigrate trans youth and label affirming parents as abusers.
Trump wrote that “gender ideology” is “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today” and claimed trans kids have been indoctrinated “with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body.”
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“The evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families,” Trump said, proceeding to brag about his executive order banning gender-affirming care for anyone under 19 years old.
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“The idea that affirming a child’s gender identity constitutes something harmful is an insult to the parents who support their transgender children with compassion and understanding,” Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Jarred Keller told Axios.
Chase Strangio, trans activist, lawyer, and co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, called the proclamation “truly horrific.”
He explained that the proclamation does not mandate any action from federal agencies but rather serves as “rhetorical violence designed to cause fear.”
But he said Trump’s words should still cause alarm since he also declared: “Every perpetrator who inflicts violence on our children will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.”
“We don’t know what that means,” Strangio said, explaining that Texas officials tried to force the state’s child welfare agency to investigate affirming parents as child abusers in 2022, but the directive has been blocked by the courts. But Strangio is expecting the federal government to attempt something similar anyway.
He also pointed out how the proclamation shows that trans rights are merely the administration’s entry point into persecuting anyone who does not fit “the traditional white Christian patriarchal family structure.”
The proclamation states that “the most powerful safeguard against child abuse is a stable family with loving parents, and that there is no substitute for a strong mother and father.” This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the National Children’s Alliance says most victims of child abuse (76%) are abused by a parent or legal guardian. Second, the statement demonizes both same-sex parents as well as single-parent households.
“This is precisely what we warned about,” Strangio said. “Once they start coming for trans people, once they start coming for families with trans kids, they are going to further entrench a very conservative, retrenched notion of the family.”
The proclamation also emphasizes the fact that the Trump Administration is devoting federal resources to a problem that does not exist, rather than focusing on preventing actual child abuse. The CDC estimated in 2024 that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys experience child sexual abuse, and using 2022 data, the National Children’s Alliance found that almost 560,000 U.S. children (or eight out of every thousand) were victims of abuse and neglect that year.
Ash Lazarus Orr, spokesperson for Advocates for Trans Equality, told Axios, “Using the language of ‘child protection’ to justify the oppression of trans youth betrays the very values this month is meant to uphold.”
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