(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.”
— Naomi Best (@naomieppsbest) August 11, 2025
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.
When Best told a GACC worker over the phone that the mother was “hesitant about binders, aware of risks like restricted breathing, chronic pain, and altered spinal development,” she was told she could “bring the child in for a free binder and fitting, no parental consent required.”
‘Santa Clara University’s Crazy Idea of Human Sexuality’
Best brought national attention to the indoctrination of graduate counseling students at SCU when she published a shocking commentary in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in June, titled, Santa Clara University’s Crazy Idea of Human Sexuality.
“The entire field of educating therapy has been hollowed out and filled in with critical theory,” wrote Best. “Therapists are no longer trained to be neutral; they’re trained to be agents of political change. Concepts like modesty and marital privacy aren’t merely treated as optional or even dismissed. They’re seen as oppressive norms to be actively combated.”
“In Multicultural Counseling, we were told that ‘objective, rational, linear thinking,’ ‘delayed gratification,’ and making a ‘plan for the future’ are traits of ‘white culture,’” Best explained. “In Human Sexuality, we were taught that children with six months of ‘gender distress’ should be ‘affirmed’ in their belief that they are of the opposite sex—without deeper assessment, even when trauma or autism was present.”
“These ideas are being promoted by the field’s top bodies,” noted Best. “The American Psychological Association, American Counseling Association and Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs have adopted standards grounded in critical theory.”
