A gender clinic in Pennsylvania that treats children as young as 8-years-old used taxpayer funding to train “mental health providers” on how to “affirm” transgender and gender expansive clients.
According to documents obtained through a Daily Caller News Foundation request, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services granted the “Gender and Sexuality Development Program” at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) nearly $180,000 over three years to create “Transgender Therapy Training Workshops.”
“These trainings began as an identified need from both transgender clients wanting to access affirming and supportive mental health care and mental health providers knowing how to best support their transgender clients,” a 2020 CHOP request for the grant said.
From The Daily Caller:
The trainings teach mental health providers that children as young as 3 years old can share their gender identity and that someone’s transgender status is “confidential” and should not be disclosed unless the individual gives permission to do so. The CHOP trainings teach that children can discover their gender identity after having “access to more resources and can use new language to describe their gender.” In the 2018-2019 fiscal year, CHOP was awarded $45,283 through the state’s “Community Mental Health Services Block Grant” for the workshops, which trained a total of 821 mental health providers with 600 participating in the webinars, the documents showed. Within the first year, CHOP aimed to increase “youth and family involvement” and boost older adults’ “engagement and access to services across all systems.” The state gave CHOP a grant for $51,966 for the fiscal year of 2019-2020 to conduct the workshops as well as pay partial salaries for two of the gender clinic employees, according to the documents. In the second year of the program, 540 mental health providers participated in the webinars while 600 signed up to attend a CHOP in-person training.
