(LifeSiteNews) — A brave graduate student whistleblower has revealed that the Jesuit-run university she attended until recently sends students to intern at a local “gender-affirming care” center that offers “transitioning” services to children as young as five years old.
Naomi Epps Best, a former marriage and family therapy graduate student at Santa Clara University (SCU), has spent the last few months reporting on the astonishing high degree of ideological capture within her field of study at the school.
“Just confirmed: Santa Clara U trains therapy students to give ‘gender-affirming’ counseling to kids as young as 5 at a state-funded clinic that hands out free binders and does affirming garment fittings with no parent consent required,” wrote Best on X.
“Most 5-year-olds are learning to tie shoes, print letters, and ride a bike without training wheels,” said Best. “This is modern therapy training.”
Grad students ‘indoctrinated into gender ideology’
“Santa Clara University endorses [Santa Clara County’s “Gender Affirming Care Clinic” (GACC)] as part of its growing LGBTQ+ emphasis,” explained Best in a recent Substack post. “It places Marriage and Family Therapy trainees at the site as part of their field training. The university touted it ‘a significant step forward for the highlighting of gender care in graduate counseling psychology education.'”
“I saw this belief system firsthand at Santa Clara. In a lecture on [so-called] transgender care, the speaker began by warning us we were about to be, as he put it, ‘indoctrinated into gender ideology,’” recounted Best. “The psychoeducation we received presented gender as a universe of endlessly multiplying identities, with male and female reduced to just two points among countless others.”
“We were shown models where ‘gender’ included not only man and woman, but pangender, genderfluid, glitterbutch, even cyborg,” she continued. “The message was clear: gender could encompass endless identities, and the therapist’s role was to affirm whichever identity a child claimed.”
“Santa Clara County and Santa Clara University are running a training ground for a new model of therapy: clinicians trained within activist frameworks that require affirmation, orienting a child’s distress toward physical intervention,” wrote. “This is not simply about one clinic; it signals a shift that the profession at large is embracing.”
No parental consent required
Best also recently reported her exchange with GACC, where SCU counseling students intern. She posed as a mentor to an 11-year-old girl who identified as “non-binary” and who was distressed about early breast development.
