Quote:When I appeared on a Heritage Foundation panel discussion in 2019, I said people are manufacturing trans gender kids. They are hurting the most vulnerable members of our society by encouraging children and adolescents to live as the opposite sex, inject hormone blockers and cross-gender hormones, and undergo surgeries that irrevocably alter healthy body parts.

These protocols are dangerous and unstudied, and shouldn’t be pushed on children. Yet this madness rages on like an unchecked forest fire.

I was a transgender child who “transitioned” to female as an adult. I lived as female for eight years, until I woke up and admitted it wasn’t working. Counseling led to emotional healing and my feelings of gender dysphoria dissipated. Hormones and surgery were unnecessary and physically harmed me. Now I use my experience to mentor others who want to reclaim their biological reality.

So, when a mother who watched the panel discussion wrote me, saying, “The video gave me the courage and helped me to take control of my 10-year-old daughter’s wellbeing,” I knew I needed to speak out again to expose the manipulation that causes vulnerable children to think they have a transgender identity.

With this mother’s permission, I share her terrifying experience of almost losing her young daughter in a few short months. I’ve shortened her emails for space and clarity. Her story illustrates how easily a ten-year-old girl can be groomed into a cross-sex identity, but for the intervention of her mindful parents.

Ten-year-old Mindy (a pseudonym) changed schools and left behind her friends just before the school lockdowns, then attended school virtually for the rest of fourth grade and all of fifth grade. When she exhibited overwhelming stress, her concerned parents took her to a counselor at the pediatrician’s office. That started their nightmare.

Their story followed a common five-step process I have seen numerous times.

Step 1. Exclude the Parents
Separating parents from their child is an excellent strategy to manufacture trans kids. Away from the parents’ watchful eyes and protection, advocates are free to indoctrinate the child into transgenderism.

Mindy was isolated for six days in the hospital from her parents, who were refused updates. Reflecting on this time, the mother says, “She was hospitalized in February for out of the blue with anxiety and depression…I’m still amazed this happened in the first place and my husband and I weren’t given any choice. They told us she was suicidal and she needed to be taken to be evaluated in house [hospitalized].”

“Three days turned into 6 and they were trying to keep her longer…refusing us updates or anything, so we told them we were coming to get her with or without their blessing… I was so overwhelmed leaving my daughter there in the first place…not allowed to see her any and only talking to her for about 3 minutes a day. This is a 10-year-old that had only spent the night 3 times in her whole life away from home. This stay was the direct result of a therapist talking to her without our presence.”

After Mindy’s time in the hospital, counselor appointments continued, but again without the parents.

“My daughter was talked to separately and myself and her father weren’t allowed [to] participate or [get] any information about the appointments,” the mother told me. “Where are the parents’ rights in this? She is 10 years old.”

She’s right: parental rights are eroding under the pretense of transgender rights. But these parents fought back.

Step 2. Leap to a Diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria
For Mindy, what started as “out of the blue” anxiety and depression quickly escalated to a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, the next crucial step in the manufacturing of trans kids.

“She began counseling at the pediatrics office and [they] quickly diagnosed her with gender dysphoria (without telling us) and possible Asperger’s in addition to the previous GAD [Generalized Anxiety Disorder]. I felt like they did not listen to me…I told the pediatrics office and counselor that this started when my daughter changed school… leaving her friends and the only school she had ever been to. [Then] school became virtual [and] nothing was normal.”

Notice how the counselor didn’t listen to the parents and their knowledge of their child. Obvious triggers—changing schools, leaving friends behind, lockdowns, and the resulting anxiety and depression—were ignored. To me, this is reckless medical malpractice and it happens far too frequently.

Notice, too, how the counselor leapt over Mindy’s co-existing issues in a rush to affirm her in a transgender identity. Depression, anxiety, Asperger’s, and GAD all have root causes and corresponding treatments that have nothing to do with gender identity.

I routinely hear from people who regret identifying as the opposite sex who say the counselor ignored all co-existing conditions. This also happened to me. In doing this, the therapists ruin the lives they claim to improve.

Step 3. Affirm the Cross-Sex Identity
Studies show that affirming a child in a cross-sex identity alters the child’s psyche and puts a child on the path to living as transgender. Without being pushed into transgenderism, most gender-confused children will re-identify with their natural sex during puberty. In other words, their feelings change, and they grow out of it.

Sometimes the parents affirm the child’s dysphoria and cross-dress him or her. More often, schools, counselors, and teachers affirm and encourage children in a cross-sex identity (new name, new pronouns, new wardrobe), and even keep it a secret from the parents.

For ten-year-old Mindy, her therapist was forthright enough, thankfully, to inform Mindy’s parents that she intended, without their permission or input, to start calling Mindy by a male name. But Mindy’s mama bear mother didn’t roll over. She took appropriate action.

“Well needless to say I began researching this day and night. This is when I found your video. I quickly requested her medical records…of course the info was blacked out but the gender dysphoria was on there.”

“We informed the same therapist that she would not be coming back. We would resume care elsewhere.”

Step 4. Glorify Trans Identities
Manufacturing trans kids wouldn’t be nearly so successful were it not for entertainment glorifying trans identities, through YouTube videos, children’s shows, video games, and education. Children are attracted (and groomed) through the influence of their peers, social media, and teachers.

It’s easy to see why a child who hits a rough period emotionally, or feels socially awkward or isolated, would be drawn to identifying as transgender as a means to acceptance and attention.

Across the nation, public schools include LGBT books and activities in the curriculum, as early as kindergarten, that romanticize those who identify as transgender. (Parents, see this article for concrete advice on fighting this in public schools.) Online, communities and popular apps are incubators, chock-full of transgender-pushing accounts ready to indoctrinate a vulnerable child. “Social contagion” is now a major factor in teens flocking to trans identities.

Mindy’s mom discovered the negative influence of those communities when Mindy made friends with two older kids online: “[Mindy] began to have anxiety more frequently after talking to them / panic attacks while online with these kids,” the mother wrote. “My gut knew this played a part.”

Mindy’s observant mother rightly sensed that Mindy’s online activity contributed to her anxiety and confusion. Most of the parents who contact me report their child has spent too much time online in chat rooms or video games. Many times, we discover the child was not gender dysphoric at all.

Step 5. Vilify and Ban All Differing Ideas
Anyone who has questions the transgender narrative faces the charge of “trans-phobic” and is ostracized. I’ve been called trans-phobic because I tell my story of transition and detransition. A distinguished child psychologist and department chair was effectively fired because he expressed the scientific fact that drugs that block puberty or cross-sex hormones can endanger a child’s long-term psychological health.

Major medical associations have changed position statements to advocate for political ideology over sound medical practice. In 20 states, counselors can lose their licenses if they question a client’s transgender identification instead of reinforcing it.

At the national level, activists disguise the true intentions of innocuous-sounding bills like the proposed Equality Act and the Fairness for All Act. Both bills ban therapy and punish all who question transitioning for children.

Loss of freedom is the result. Individual health professionals must comply or lose their livelihood. Concerned parents can’t find a counselor who will challenge the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Parents face being labeled “trans-phobic” and more severe legal repercussions, such as a visit from child protective services and possible seizure of their children. The child suffers the consequences for a lifetime.

Parents Can Derail This Runaway Train
Mindy’s mother demonstrated how parents can release a child from the grip of a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis. She didn’t follow blindly the opinions that ran contrary to her observations and common sense. Instead, she researched and found resources to educate herself, starting with the Heritage Foundation panel discussion.

She withdrew her daughter from the harmful influence of trans-affirming health professionals, then sat quietly with her daughter and listened with love. It worked. She writes,

She finally opened up stating the very same things I said all along… the school change began her anxiety…different school, no friends, feeling different, starting to develop (didn’t like that) and she had been bothered on the bus by an older kid but most of all the she had been encouraged and exposed to the Transgender World by the same 2 kids and researched it on the internet…needless to say [she received] bad info…she was just on overload with everything. She says [she’s] not a transgender and was doing it because the 2 were her friends encouraged her…she felt like they would not be her friends if she didn’t play along. You saved my daughter’s future and my family.

By Mindy’s own admission, she’s not trans. Her former therapist was attempting to manufacture a transgender child out of an overwhelmed ten-year-old who needed friends after changing schools. Happily, the parents put a stop to that madness.

Unfortunately, for thousands more, their stories don’t end so well.

Quote:Transgenderism escalated quickly. As it burst into the nation’s consciousness just more than half a decade ago, we were told the trans movement was about being kind to Bruce as he became Caitlyn. Now we are told that it is about supporting the sterilization and castration of children. Instead of a male former Olympian trying to live as a woman, we now have males competing as women in the Olympics.

The mutilation of children is not the only concerning part of the trans agenda, but it is the most extreme demand. We are instructed by the powers that be, from the Biden administration to Big Tech to corporate media, that “trans kids” know who they are and we must therefore support chemically and surgically remaking their bodies. Not to do so, we are warned, is to drive these children to suicide.

Yet this narrative struggles to answer many reasonable questions. Why has there been a surge of minors identifying as transgender — including many cases in which gender dysphoria appears to be sudden and socially induced, rather than innate and persistent? What about the people who regret “transitioning” and seek to “de-transition”? Are children capable of informed consent for genital mutilation?

These queries are at the heart of “Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?” This new documentary is available on YouTube (for now, at least) and was produced by Jennifer Lahl of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. The film’s creators understood the audience wants answers to these questions, and let their subjects answer them.

“Trans Mission” therefore opens with the stories of people who have “de-transitioned,” which are rarely acknowledged by corporate media. These regrets pose a significant problem for the transgender movement, which has opposed any barriers to transgender procedures, even for children. But many of the physical and psychological consequences of surgeries like castration and mastectomies are permanent.

The film features doctors and parents who share these concerns. The doctors’ concerns are clinical, noting the health risks of chemically delayed puberty, cross-sex hormones, and so-called “gender-affirming” surgeries. The parents are deeply concerned for their children and angered that the transgender movement, including therapists and teachers, validates threats of suicide as demands for “transition.”

It is far from clear that sterilizing surgeries and hormone treatments reduce suicide among those with gender dysphoria, let alone among such children. On the contrary, they include a host of health risks and irreversible changes. Giving females large doses of testosterone is not good for them, and giving children puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones can sterilize them, even before surgery.

These are weighty matters. The transgender agenda makes extraordinary claims and issues extraordinary demands. It declares a boy may actually be a girl, or vice versa. It proclaims children have an innate, immutable gender identity (which they may know even as toddlers) that supersedes anatomy. And it insists any claims to transgender identity (or in the case of young children, perceived expressions of such an identity) be uncritically affirmed and supported.

It’s not news that some people are, at different points in life, distressed by their bodies and specifically their sex. Such individuals should be treated with compassion and respect. But the reasonable response in such cases is not to fabricate a persona of the opposite sex, with the likely result of surgery and sterilization. It’s especially unreasonable for very young children.

These matters should at least be up for debate, but the transgender movement and its powerful supporters have sought to stifle discussion. Critics are punished and censored.

It’s also not just social conservatives who are targeted. As “Trans Mission” shows, feminists and homosexual activists also have reason to resist the trans movement, which erases the distinction between the biological sexes. Many feminists, for example, are appalled by the male invasion of female spaces, from homeless shelters to sports. However, such reasonable concerns are often brushed aside or tarred as bigotry.

That’s why films like “Trans Mission” are important. This film is not the final word, but it is an important contribution to a conversation we must have, even if some would prefer suppression to discussion. In this, the tone of the documentary is an important asset. Although its subjects are sometimes emotional, this film is not shrill. It aims to inform, not to alienate.

There will, of course, be critics of this film. But trans advocates who seek to persuade, rather than intimidate, must address the questions the film raises. In particular, they must confront the problems of pushing trans ideology on children.

Even if we accepted the claim that some adults should surgically alter their bodies to impersonate the opposite sex, could we ever justify putting young children on a course of social and medical interventions that will leave them sterile and consigned to a life of potentially hazardous hormone treatments?

Compassion and kindness demand we answer these questions honestly and accurately. This is not about being nice to Caitlyn. It’s about ruinous mutilations of children’s bodies.