In September 2019, a 19-year-old named Yaeli knelt down on a set of train tracks and raised her arms to the sky as the locomotive came toward her.
Three years earlier, California had taken her away from her mother.
Yaeli Martinez was 16 and struggling with her mental health when staff in the Arcadia Unified School District started guiding her through a gender transition. Her mother, Abigail Martinez, objected. She warned that her daughter needed mental health treatment, not gender reassignment. Los Angeles County's Department of Children and Family Services answered by labeling Abigail abusive and removing Yaeli from the home.
In state care, Yaeli was given testosterone. Her mother says she needed therapy. The abuse claim against Abigail was eventually dropped. By then the state had already done what it set out to do.
On September 30, Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois introduced a bill with Yaeli's name on it.
"Raising your son as a boy or your daughter as a girl is not child abuse," Schmitt said. "No way in hell should Washington fund bureaucrats who rip kids from their parents for refusing to bow to gender ideology."
The Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act runs 118 pages. That's 118 pages of federal law to establish something every grandparent in America already knew.
Here is what it does. Any state, tribe or organization that removes children from parents who won't affirm a supposed transgender identity loses its funding under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. It restricts what the bill calls "sex-rejecting procedures" for kids in state care, meaning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery. And it amends the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act so state courts have to honor custody orders from other states.
That last provision has a name and a face. They belong to Jeff Younger.
Younger is a Texas father of twin boys, James and Jude. His ex-wife, Anne Georgulas, is a pediatrician. She decided James was a girl named "Luna." Younger said James was his son.
In October 2019, a Dallas jury voted 11-1 to give Georgulas sole custody. That would have put the decision to medically transition James in her hands alone. Two days later, Judge Kim Cooks set the verdict aside and ordered joint custody, so neither parent could start medical treatment without the other's consent.
Georgulas asked to have Cooks removed from the case. Cooks was recused that December. In August 2021, a new judge, Mary Brown, gave Georgulas sole custody. The reason on paper was that Younger had fallen behind on child support, which he had already paid in full by the time she ruled. From then on, his visits with his own sons were supervised, at his own expense.
Brown's order did keep one protection in place. Georgulas was barred from putting James on puberty blockers or hormones, or approving surgery.
Then, in December 2022, Georgulas moved the boys to California, days before Senate Bill 107 took effect on January 1. That law blocks out-of-state court orders that stand in the way of a child's gender transition.
Younger asked the Texas Supreme Court to stop the move. The court refused, 8-1. Justice John Devine dissented. Two of the justices in the majority reassured everyone that Georgulas would still be bound by the Texas order.
That reassurance held until November 2024. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mark Juhas then gave Georgulas the authority to move ahead with transition treatment for 12-year-old James.
"I don't understand why the government entities, the courts, the legislatures," Younger said, "none of them have protected my son."
A Texas court order that existed to protect a little boy stopped working at the California line. The Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act amendment is there to close that route.
The Heritage Foundation has documented how the system got this way: "For more than a decade, activists backed by federal funding have trained caseworkers, doctors, therapists, and judges to treat a parent's refusal to 'affirm' a gender-confused child as abuse or neglect."
The key words are "federal funding." American taxpayers paid to train the people who take children from parents who refuse to go along.
More than 30 organizations have signed on in support. Heritage Action, Concerned Women for America and the America First Policy Institute are on the list, as you'd expect. So are the Women's Liberation Front, the LGB Courage Coalition and a group called Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender. When gay-rights groups and Democrats sign the same letter as Heritage, the "far-right" label gets hard to make stick.
The advocacy group Our Duty USA described the hardest part of the fight: "Convincing the general public that it's happening, when they can't imagine such a thing, is a big part of the battle."
Most parents have no idea that saying no to a school counselor's transition plan can end with a caseworker at the front door. The cases already span California, Massachusetts, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Texas.
Abigail Martinez has since filed briefs with the Supreme Court supporting state bans on child gender transitions, and spoken out against California's policy of keeping parents in the dark. She buried her daughter. The agency that took Yaeli kept working.
In Massachusetts, Joseph and Arlene Kutzko are living the sequel right now.
The family says staff at Algonquin Regional High School began treating their 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, as a boy without telling them. The Kutzkos objected to the school's gender transitioning of their daughter once they found out. In December 2024, the Department of Children and Families removed Sophie from their Southborough home. They claimed the daughter was being abused by the father.
Gov. Maura Healey says DCF acted "after criminal charges against the parents, not over gender care." Joseph was accused of hitting Sophie in the shoulder and pulling her hair. Arlene was charged with witness intimidation. Both cases were closed with no-contact conditions and no guilty finding. The incident behind those charges is dated January 2025, a month after the state took Sophie.
Sophie has been in state custody for nearly two years. In that time, DCF has tried to start her on high-dose testosterone. A judge has blocked the hormones for now.
The Kutzkos' next hearing is October 29. The bill named for Yaeli Martinez has been in Congress since September 30.