CPAC panelists sound alarm amid transgender-related parental rights battles

By Tyler Arnold

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Feb 22, 2024 / 22:08 pm

The president of the American Principles Project, Terry Schilling, warned that the “transgender industry” is waging a “war on families” amid efforts by states to tear children away from parents who refuse to facilitate their children’s gender transitions.

“They are declaring war on families,” said Schilling, a Catholic, during a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on Thursday.

The panel — titled “Genesis 1:27” in reference to the biblical affirmation that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” — delved into concerns about state governments imposing gender ideology on families and allowing surgical sex-change operations to be performed on children in more than half of the country.

The panelists specifically referenced the situation in Indiana, where the state government took a 15-year-old out of his parents’ custody after the teenager began to identify as transgender. The Catholic parents, Mary and Jeremy Cox, refused to refer to their son as a girl based on their belief that sex is immutable, and he developed an eating disorder.

Although the Indiana Court of Appeals could not substantiate any abuse or neglect from the parents, the judges still removed the child from the home and placed him with a family that would refer to him as a girl as a means to address the eating disorder. The appellate ruling occurred in October 2022, but the parents asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case last week.

The panelists also discussed the growing trend in states such as California, Washington, and Minnesota to pass laws that allow out-of-state runaway children to receive transgender surgeries without the knowledge or consent of their parents. 

Schilling said these laws and state actions “incriminate parents for doing their jobs” by punishing them “for protecting their children from this [transgender] industry that will quite literally chew them up and spit them out with destroyed bodies.” 

The Catholic father of six criticized what he called the “transgender for-profit industry,” which he said is enriching itself by providing transgender drugs to children and facilitating sex-change operations.

Schilling was joined on the panel by Dr. Eithan Haim, who was investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for leaking details about a secretive program to facilitate sex changes for children at the Texas Children’s Hospital.

Haim encouraged doctors to speak up about the harm caused by facilitating gender transitions for children, arguing that “we take an oath when we go into medical school and we follow this path that we should do no harm, [and] that doesn’t just apply to the clinic [or] to the operating room … but it applies outside of that.” 

“These doctors [who facilitate sex changes for children] have believed they can become God and create something new when the actual goal of medicine is to preserve and strengthen what’s already been created,” Haim added.

The panel was hosted by Meg Brock of the Daily Caller News Foundation. This year’s CPAC proceedings continue through Saturday, Feb. 24.

Tyler Arnold is a staff reporter for Catholic News Agency, based in EWTN News’ Washington Bureau. He previously worked at The Center Square and has been published in a variety of outlets, including The Associated Press, National Review, The American Conservative, and The Federalist.