The Strange Crime of Montana’s Kolstad Case
A broken Montana agency specializing in child separation allows a teen to “transition” her gender with terrible consequences.
For the last ten months, the attention of conservative newspapers and commentators has circled with increasing intensity around a Montana lawsuit that the state’s largest agency would like them to forget. On one side of the controversy are Todd and Krista Kolstad, the father and step-mother of five children, one of whom, “Jennifer” (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) has been removed from their care and sent to live with her birth-mother in Canada, where, at fourteen, she is being allowed to identify as a man named Leo. On the other is the Child and Family Services Division (CFSD) of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services (MDPHHS).
The case, Kolstad v. Baillargeon, in which the Kolstads are suing two employees of CFSD in their personal capacities, turns on two issues crucial for conservatives—parental rights and gender transitioning for minors—and their collision sheds light on broader problems facing populists and traditionalists.
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The first is that unaccountable administrators with specific prejudices have gained power in even America’s more conservative states. The second is that politicians, including Republicans, elected to supervise these administrators are refusing to do so, jettisoning the very mission that MDPHHS promises in its logo: To not just “improve health, safety, and well-being” but “to empower independence.”
A Family Matter Becomes a Project of the State of Montana
Todd Kolstad fits the bill of upstanding citizen. A married father of five, he owns an IT consulting company which enjoys testimonials from county sheriffs, public school superintendents, and the Montana Southern Baptist Convention. But Kolstad is also the veteran of a failed first marriage, which his middle daughter, Tara, described this way to KRTV Montana: “Things were rough because of our birth mom . . . she was that type of person that would take your money and go.”
Collateral from the breakup of the first marriage followed Todd into the second via its effect on his last child, Jennifer, who struggled in school and seemed to her parents to start acting out for attention. At the end of last August, after a visit from a CFSD employee, Jennifer was hospitalized with the consent of her parents. Jennifer, who stated that she was not comfortable speaking in front of Todd and Krista, described the problem as her choosing to identify as a man and Todd and Krista failing to agree to this identification until she was an adult.
The CFSD representative, Cyndi Baillargeon, named in the lawsuit, and a doctor suggested taking Jennifer to a Wyoming hospital for a longer stay due to what they said was a shortage of beds in Montana, which Todd and Krista refused: they wanted Jennifer in a hospital but not one in a state where gender-transitioning for minors is legal. (In fact, it was also legal in Montana at the time, because the law banning the procedure had not yet gone into effect.) But the transfer was made anyway in late August on the grounds that “the (child) is suicidal and needs acute psychiatric care” and “birth father and Stepmother refuse to sign paperwork in order for (child) to get the care that’s recommended by medical professionals.”
From Wyoming, Jennifer was sent to a group home in Montana, where she was allowed to identify as a man. After an inspection of the Kolstads home in October at which the Kolstads were handed a pamphlet (“How Parents Can Support their Transgender Teens”) and a supervised meeting in November between the Kolstads and Jennifer, CFSD made the separation permanent. In February, CFSD employees accompanied Jennifer to live with her birth mother in Canada, where she remains and where gender transitioning for minors is legal. The Kolstads sued.
Who is Deciding—and What are their Biases?
Custody cases, like political fights, often become complex because the stakes are so high that people will say anything to get their way. So an arbiter should never believe one side over the other without making an extensive investigation.
In this case, CFSD employees did the opposite: They believed Jennifer when she said that she was suicidal and that it stemmed from her parents’ unwillingness to treat her as a boy, and acted accordingly. This was despite real reasons for doubting Jennifer’s claims—among them that, though Jennifer had said she had swallowed toilet bowl cleaner and ibuprofen, which is what got her hospitalized in the first place, neither were detected in her system.
What’s more, according to the Kolstads, hospital staff undercut them on issues as minor as them urging Jennifer to eat healthier food. Staffers also acceded to Jennifer’s request to call her by male pronouns and the name Leo; and when her parents, who not only have raised her but are believing Christians, objected, staffers told them to take the issue up with the hospital’s lawyer. Whatever Jennifer was saying and doing, the people in power were ready to believe and support her at the expense of facts and the beliefs of her parents.
Troublingly, at least when it comes to CFSD and its parent agency MDPHHS more broadly, this is not a one-time occurrence. Digging into recent history suggests it is part of a trend of systemic neglect by an agency which covers its shortfalls through alleging neglect by others.
Deeper Rot at the MDPHHS
One constant in reports and commentary on MDPHHS is that “major and concerted change [is] necessary” when it comes to its mental and behavioral health services, the ones CFSD relied on when placing “H.” The other is that CFSD, which actually took Jennifer from her parents, separates children from their parents at a much higher rate than agencies in any other state.
So far, the brunt of these separations have been born by Montana’s Native American community. But the fallout has extended further, to the point where, in 2022, the Daily Montanan reported, based on a legislative audit, that CFSD had made Montana “the child removal capital of America”—triple the rate of the national average.
Six years earlier, in 2016, the Montana Independent Record listed complaints about the department as including that “kids are taken away from parents who have done nothing wrong and are stuck in the system too long” and “child protection specialists have too much power with no one to keep them in check.” It noted that critics came from “a wide range of groups” including “an organization called ‘Grandparents Group of Montana’ [which] has staged rallies at the Capitol and in cities around the state.”
A look at the organizational chart of the MDPHHS, which has been reported to have major turnover problems (“about 30 of the 178 positions [are] . . . vacant at any given time” in CFSD alone), suggests that its personnel are one reason why CFSD takes the path of least resistance at children’s expense. Jessie Counts, listed on the department’s website and in news reports as MDPHHS’s Human Services Executive Director responsible for supervising the CFSD section, appears to have previously been the Student Support Services Senior Manager at Montana’s Office of Public Instruction and has no experience with family services.
Though resumé information is scarce for Cyndi Baillargeon, the CFSD employee who determined that Jennifer “is suicidal and needs acute psych care,” she seems to have been deputized in 2017 as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) based on “complet[ing] the FLEX Learning course, an online and classroom hybrid for CASA introduction and training.” Nor does their ultimate boss, MDPHHS director Charlie Brereton, have much hands-on experience: He is a 28-year-old with two years Departmental experience in Montana and three years staffing experience in Washington, D.C.
A more experienced operator appears to be Nikki Grossberg, a twenty year department veteran with a degree in Criminology/Sociology who studied for a Master’s in sports management and who now runs CFSD. Grossberg thought the thing to say for a 2024 Montana Free Press feature about Native Americans being 10 percent of the state’s child population and one-third of its foster child population was this:
I think it’s really about continuing to have the conversation. And with the whole system, right? So really talking with the judges, the attorneys, our providers. One, to acknowledge it, make sure we know what’s out there, and two, to bring people together, to really help try to figure out, you know, the ‘why’ and then ‘how do we do what’…The conversation is not going away. It’s something that all states, including Montana, need to really focus on and continue to work and address. And I think we do that by engaging our tribal partners to figure out and find solutions.
Who’s Letting Kids Transition?
MDPHHS’s controversy with the Kolstads, an example of the very administrative buck-passing that conservatives oppose on the part of an agency which seems to specialize in it, appears to afford an obvious opportunity for MDPHHS director Brereton: A designated reformer who recently managed to secure $300 million for overhauling MDPHHS’s behavioral health system despite not having a plan to do so. The controversy gives Brereton room to persuade the public about the urgency of the funding, gain support to make changes to the agency, and satisfy his conservative constituency.
And yet Brereton, a Republican, has stayed silent—with the backing, oddly, of both Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte as well as the Republican Lieutenant Governor, who conducted a cursory investigation into the case then declared herself satisfied with MDPHHS’s position. But MDPHHS’s position—that “the youth’s gender identity… is not…of any concern to the department”; that “the department was only involved because the youth was deemed to be acutely suicidal”; and that since she is “no longer at risk of self-harm or suicide…the emergency situation giving rise to the department involvement has been resolved”—does not line up with the facts of the case. It was only, in Jennifer’s telling, because of her parents’ refusal to recognize her gender identification that she became suicidal—meaning that gender is at the heart of this case, and what MDPHHS is saying is not a reason but a whitewash.
Granted, some of the issues Brereton is confronting via MDPHHS are bigger than any one department: the results of mostly Democratic policies from establishment Washington and their mounting collateral over many decades. The hardships facing Indian reservations have their roots in Washington policies of the 1950s which forcibly incentivized Indians to leave what that generation’s uniparty called an unfit environment and move to cities, draining them of resources. The crisis in the Kolstad family has its roots in a push by Washington-connected universities, nonprofits, and corporations beginning in the 1990s that put gender up for grabs in the name of science and self-expression—making it another expert-sanctioned choice in a consumer buffet set out by Hollywood, New York, and Washington, D.C that has functioned to marginalize on-the-ground families and faith.
But these crises are also ones that state governments can help address by taking on unaccountable administrators whose ears are to universities and federal agencies, and their various prejudices, not citizens on the ground. This is what Brereton is refusing to do. Instead he is supporting massive infusions of taxpayer money with limited legislative supervision into an agency which includes several branches seemingly unable to achieve the basic tasks assigned to them.
The Case’s Bigger Stakes
It may seem incongruous that an evil as extreme as separating children from parents to avoid hassle is occurring under the aegis of low-or-mid-level operators in sub-divisions of a state agency. But “the banality of evil” comes from exactly this creep of bureaucracy, which encourages passing the buck and insulates those passing it. The Kolstads and their outside supporters are not letting this happen. Brad Dacus, President of Pacific Justice Institute, whose attorneys are representing the Kolstads, says that the case is a top priority, and could go as far as the Supreme Court.
“We at PJI,” Dacus told me, “intend to go to bat for families just like this one to make sure that these cruel abuses and attacks on parental rights do not become the norm for social workers across America. If Montana gets away with this, that’s a green light for agencies in other states to do the same.” At stake in this effort are both the lives of children and the incentive for elected representatives to side with citizens—not civil servants who, as their name implies, exist to serve the public.
Matt Wolfson, an ex-leftist investigative journalist, tweets @Ex__Left and writes at Oppo-research.com.
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