Santa Clara University—a Jesuit institution—is partnering with the county’s Gender Affirming Care Clinic to place graduate therapy students in clinical training roles. Notably, the clinic serves transgender and gender-diverse youth, including children as young as five years old.
Naomi Epps Best, a former marriage and family therapy graduate student at the university, revealed the arrangement on social media. She criticized that graduate-level students are being taught to administer “gender-affirming” interventions to very young children, including offering free binders and affirming clothing changes, often without parental consent.
Best described her experience in lectures where gender ideology was explicitly the focus, saying she was warned during lectures to expect “indoctrination into gender ideology.” Course content portrayed gender as a fluid spectrum with numerous identities, shifting away from male and female as definitive categories. Students were taught that their role was to affirm whatever identity a child claims.
She warned that this clinical partnership serves as more than just field training—it embeds activism into therapy education. Counselors are being socialized to affirm a child’s gender identity as policy, rather than provide neutral guidance. According to Best, this marks a radical shift in preparing clinicians for careers rooted in ideological conviction rather than therapeutic balance.
Santa Clara University touted this collaboration as “a significant step forward” for its gender-affirming care training initiative. But for many parents and advocates, the question is why a Catholic institution is exposing children as young as five to gender-affirmation practices—with no parental consent required. The partnership raises serious concerns about the direction of both education and care for vulnerable minors, and a Catholic university’s complicit role in this indoctrination.
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