Megan Brock

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I mean, really, I've been FOIAing this group, Public Records Request, if anyone doesn't know what FOIA means, since January 2024 is when I really started it.

I uncovered on the HHS website late winter of 2023 a document that was produced by HHS where the Biden administration was recommending that social workers doing in-home visits to

viewed parents not allowing a child under five to express their so-called gender by, for example, a boy wearing a dress to consider that a form of child abuse.

And when I found that document, it absolutely shocked me.

I mean, I knew the medical stuff.

I think we all saw the stuff that you said going on with the drag queens, but it really never occurred to me what might be going on in child welfare services.

So that's really what kind of got me started down that path.

Yeah, so freedom of information requests are something that's required of every level of government.

So you can file what's called a FOIA or maybe a different name to your local government, to your school board, or even to the federal government.

So basically, it allows citizens and journalists to have government transparency.

So you can ask for trainings.

You can ask for emails.

There's all kinds of information you can obtain through these public records requests.

And so when I had found this document, it had a grant number on it saying where the money came from that had helped produce this piece of information that was really saying that not affirming a child's transgender identity was a form of abuse.

And I started looking up other grants and started just finding publicly available information and discovered there was this group of researchers that had been given a $10 million grant back in 2016, right at the tail end of the Obama presidency,

to start implementing, researching, and creating what I would call gender-affirming child welfare services interventions.

So these were programs that re-educated parents who were not quote-unquote affirming or might help a child who had left their parents' home because they were transgender parents.

find their quote unquote chosen affirming family, you know, so all kinds of really crazy things.

And I had realized that a group of these researchers were based in Ohio and working for a public child welfare service there, which was something that would be subject to public records.