Whistleblower: California clinic offers ‘gender transition’ tools to 11-year-olds without parental consent

A Santa Clara County clinic is facing scrutiny after a graduate student reported Aug. 31 that children as young as 11 are being offered gender-transition resources — including chest binders — without parental consent.

Naomi Epps Best, a former Marriage and Family Therapy student at Santa Clara University and intern in the county’s mental health program, detailed her experience in a Substack post. During a phone call to the county’s Gender Affirming Care Clinic (GACC), Best posed as a mentor to an 11-year-old distressed by early breast development. 

When she mentioned that the child’s mother had reservations about chest binders due to known health risks, a clinic worker reportedly told her the child could receive a free binder and fitting, with no parental involvement needed.

The clinic, which opened in December 2023, offers “outpatient behavioral health services to transgender and gender-diverse individuals age 5 and older.” It also offers therapy, peer support, and assistance with pursuing so-called “gender-affirming” interventions — including referrals for medical procedures. 

The clinic also maintains a library, including a dedicated children’s section, stocked with materials that support its gender ideology.

Santa Clara University actively supports the clinic, placing Marriage and Family Therapy trainees there for fieldwork. The university described the partnership as “a significant step forward for the highlighting of gender care in graduate counseling psychology education.” 

Best characterized the training model as focused “more on affirming acts than clinical assessment,” citing examples such as students “helping people fill out the forms necessary to change their gender designation” or “accompanying them in buying gender-affirming clothes.” One trainee reportedly celebrated the opportunity to bring “social justice, intersectionality” and “resisting oppression” into therapeutic practice.

“This is presented as mental healthcare and psychoeducation, but in practice, students are teaching a postmodern academic framework of sex and gender, with little emphasis on developmental science or long-term outcome data,” she said.

Best originally blew the whistle on the graduate counseling program at Santa Clara University. As CatholicVote reported in June, she reported that the university’s training emphasized sexually explicit content and ideologically driven instruction. 

One required course, she said, assigned sexually explicit reading material and screened adult content in class. Students were also instructed to complete a “sexual autobiography,” detailing their early sexual experiences and preferences.

The report also highlighted what Best described as the program’s emphasis on critical theory over traditional therapeutic principles. In one instance, she said students were taught that traits like rational thinking, delayed gratification, and long-term planning were associated with “white culture.” 

Best further elaborated in her Substack post, recounting a lecture on transgender care in which the instructor reportedly warned students they were “about to be, as he put it, ‘indoctrinated into gender ideology.’” She described being shown classroom models portraying gender as a fluid spectrum, with male and female presented as just two options among an expanding list of identities — including “pangender, genderfluid, glitterbutch, even cyborg.”

“The message was clear: gender could encompass endless identities, and the therapist’s role was to affirm whichever identity a child claimed,” Best wrote.

Shortly after publicly criticizing the program in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Best was dismissed from her internship.

In her recent Substack post, she warned against what she sees as a broader shift in the profession — one that extends beyond any single clinic or university.

“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,” she said. “This is not simply about one clinic; it signals a shift that the profession at large is embracing.”

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