150 Homes in 10 Years: The Foster Care System Is Failing Trans Kids

Hayden Dawson was placed in over 150 foster homes between the ages of 8 and 18. Nonbinary and gender fluid, Dawson grew up in rural Kansas, cycling through a system that had no framework for — and often active hostility toward — who they were. Roughly 80% of their placements were non-accepting. In some homes, they were forced to eat outside. In others, food was withheld entirely. By adolescence, Dawson was suicidal, moving in and out of mental health facilities with no stable placement in sight.

Dawson’s story, reported this week by Uncloseted Media, isn’t an outlier. It’s the system working as designed — or rather, failing as expected. Trans and nonbinary youth enter the foster care system at five times the rate of the general population. Once there, they’re three times more likely to attempt suicide than non-fostered LGBTQ+ peers. Forty-five percent of trans and nonbinary youth in foster care have attempted suicide. LGBTQ+ children now make up roughly one-third of America’s entire foster care population.

These numbers are staggering, and they’re about to get worse.

The federal safety net is being dismantled

In 2024, the Biden administration adopted a federal designated placement rule that would have required state and tribal child welfare agencies to provide affirming placements for LGBTQ+ youth who requested them. It was the first federal policy to explicitly address the needs of queer kids in care.

It didn’t last. A federal court vacated the rule last year. Then, last month, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services proposed rescinding it altogether. The Administration for Children and Families announced it would remove requirements ensuring placement for children “who self-identify with an alternative sexual orientation or self-identify as something other than their sex.” Public comments were collected until April 6 — and the outcome is not in doubt.

The practical effect: there is now no federal requirement that child welfare agencies place trans kids in homes that won’t reject them. Federal law still theoretically requires “safe placements,” but as Lambda Legal attorney Currey Cook told Uncloseted Media, there’s widespread “confusion over what’s legal,” and caseworkers are increasingly afraid to advocate for LGBTQ+ youth at all.

State legislatures are making it worse

The federal retreat has emboldened state lawmakers. At least 11 states have introduced bills this year that would explicitly allow foster parents to refuse to affirm a queer child’s identity. The language varies, but the effect is the same: enshrining rejection into law.

New Hampshire has proposed a bill stating that refusing to affirm a child’s gender identity “cannot legally count as abuse.” North Carolina passed a similar law in 2025. South Carolina and Georgia have introduced measures blocking state intervention in gender-related cases in foster care.

These bills don’t just permit indifference — they incentivize it. When the law says that refusing to use a child’s pronouns isn’t abuse, it sends a clear signal to foster parents, caseworkers, and agencies about which children matter and which don’t.

The hidden infrastructure of care

Despite everything, there are people trying to make the system work. Across the country, a patchwork of affirming foster programs exists — but many operate as what child advocacy attorney Mary Kelly Persyn calls “hidden programs,” accessible only through insider referrals. Foster agency matching systems don’t even have fields for documenting a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity, making systematic matching impossible.

Only 11 states require caseworker training on LGBTQ+ issues. Sixteen states lack any explicit nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ youth in care. The infrastructure for helping these kids exists in fragments, sustained by individual caseworkers and small organizations rather than systemic policy.

Persyn is blunt about the consequences of placing trans and nonbinary children in rejecting homes: the result is “physically, emotionally, psychologically and developmentally” dangerous. The research backs her up — and so do the suicide statistics.

What’s actually needed

The solutions aren’t mysterious. They’re the same things advocates have been calling for: federal nondiscrimination protections that can’t be rescinded by executive action. Mandatory caseworker training. Matching systems that account for identity. Recruitment of affirming foster families. And funding — actual, sustained funding — for the organizations doing this work on the ground.

None of this is likely under the current administration. The political trajectory in Washington is moving in the opposite direction, and the states stepping in to fill the gap are outnumbered by the states actively making things worse.

For kids like Hayden Dawson — who aged out of the system and survived, though many don’t — the policy debates are abstract. The 150 placements were not abstract. The hunger was not abstract. The suicidality was not abstract.

The foster care system’s treatment of trans youth is one of the clearest examples of how anti-LGBTQ+ policy translates into material harm to children. Not hypothetical children. Not culture war abstractions. Real kids, cycling through real homes, in a system that was supposed to protect them.

If you’re a young person in crisis, The Trevor Project provides 24/7 support at 1-866-488-7386, via text (text START to 678-678), or at TheTrevorProject.org.