When Gender Ideology Comes Home From School

No parents are prepared for their child to adopt a trans identity. But that is exactly what happened to our family in the spring of 2020. Our daughter was 13 years old, and it was the height of COVID. She had entered adolescence with a somewhat complex profile. She is both gifted and struggles with focus and attention issues, which for many kids can read like symptoms of autism until their frontal lobes mature. Making and maintaining friendships had been a struggle for her leading up to middle school. She is a very creative child, but different from most other children. She always marched to her own beat and was interested in activities, books, and music outside the norm of her peers. When she started middle school, she fell into a friend group that was quirky like her and had similar interests, so, initially, my husband and I were thrilled. But that elation slowly turned to concern when the friend group became hyper-fixated on LGBT identities and labels which changed often. (Three of her friends, for instance, had adopted a trans identity.)

We also noticed changes in our daughter. She became more agitated and withdrawn. She had a cell phone, but we had a monitoring app on it, and we thought we were making smart and safe choices for her by not allowing any social media or communication platforms like Discord or Snapchat. We also did not allow any electronics in our children’s bedrooms overnight. But we were naïve. The other children in the friend group had unrestricted access to the internet and social media apps. They had access to all of the things we were trying to protect her from and would frequently share LGBT memes and gender ideology propaganda in their group chat. Things came to a head in May of 2020 when our daughter, who had never before expressed confusion over her sex, came to us and said she no longer felt like she was a girl.

This declaration turned our world upside down and started us on a painful journey we were not prepared for and that would forever change our lives. I am a licensed mental health counselor but put my career on hold when I had children, immersing myself in their education and activities.

When I was trained in counseling in the late 90’s, the diagnosis of sex confusion was extremely rare. Most clinicians would go their entire career and never have a patient experiencing gender dysphoria or distress over their sex. Traditional pathways of sex confusion were experienced predominantly by boys in early childhood and were sometimes precipitated by some form of trauma or sexual abuse. What I was seeing in our daughter’s friend group was not corresponding with my clinical training at all. These children appeared to be feeding off one another, and it felt like they were changing identities like they were trying on new personas. This was the first time I had heard words like “non-binary,” “gender-fluid,” “demi-girl,” “demi-boy,” and “gender queer.” I was confused by what my daughter was sharing with me in terms of her perceived “gender identity” and what I knew to be a biological reality: There are two sexes, male and female, and sex is binary. Even with traditional pathways of gender dysphoria, there weren’t people identifying as a “non-sex” or both sexes. As we were trying to navigate this with our daughter, we elicited the help of a licensed counselor to help us understand what was happening and work on her co-occurring issues of anxiety and emotional dysregulation.

As with many of these girls, the situation escalated quickly. That summer, she started asking to go by a different name and to adopt “they/them” pronouns. She also asked for a breast binder, which is a very tight undergarment meant to flatten or bind breasts. She was perseverating on this trans identity, and we were extremely concerned about her.

When school officials socially transition children behind the backs of loving parents, what they are doing is a form of parental alienation. They sent [our daughter] a clear message that our parental authority was no longer wanted or needed and that she should be protected from us, not by us.

When school started that August, I reached out to a teacher via email as I had done many times before to let her know what was happening with my child and the steps we were taking as a family. I told her that our daughter was asking to be called by a different name that we were not affirming at home. I also told her that we had sought counseling to help us navigate this issue with her and that I thought my daughter’s confusion was directly related to her friend group. I naïvely thought the teacher would see the issue as we did. I was very much mistaken. As it happened, the teacher I confided in turned out to be the LGBTQ advocate on the middle school campus.

A couple of weeks into the fall term, my daughter got into the car after school and told me she had had a meeting about her name that day, during which she was asked which restroom she wanted to use. I was shocked and confused. I didn’t understand why the school had a meeting with my eighth-grade child that I was not notified about or invited to. I was also confused as to why they asked her which restroom she wanted to use. She is female, so the answer should be obvious. I immediately emailed the guidance counselor asking for information about this meeting and made clear that allowing our daughter to choose whether or not to use the male restroom risked her safety. I was then called by the guidance counselor and assistant principal and told that they could not give me any information about the private meeting they had with my daughter because she was now protected by a non-discrimination law. My only recourse was to contact the assistant superintendent, which I did. This communication, in the form of emails and phone calls between my husband, the assistant superintendent, and me, went on for approximately six weeks. Then, we were finally given an in-person meeting with the principal of the middle school.

During this meeting, we were shown the “transgender support plan” they created with our 13-year-old daughter without our knowledge or consent.

This social transition plan went well beyond choosing a nickname for our daughter. They sat our daughter down in a private meeting with three adults—the assistant principal, guidance counselor, and a social worker I had never met. They gave her discretion to make consequential decisions that could have gravely impacted her safety—such as which restroom and locker room she preferred to use and which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips.

We asked what legal justification they had for meeting alone with our daughter and instituting this social transition plan without informing us. More than a week later, we were given a copy of the county’s LGBTQ guide. This guide was over thirty pages long and explicitly painted all parents as a potential danger to their children. Natural parental authority was totally undermined, and parents were given no due process. This guide was also filled with ideological pseudoscience which teaches children the lie that they have a “gender identity” or an internal feeling of their gender that is completely separate from their sex and that they could choose to be a boy, girl, neither (non-binary), or both (gender fluid). These guidelines instructed the school officials to affirm any identity a child presents, regardless of co-occurring mental health issues. The guide also instructed school officials to use any name and pronoun the child requests and burdened the minor child with the decision to have their parents notified or not.

I started researching school policies in Florida and quickly realized that not only did other counties also have similar LGBT guides, but that what happened to our family was not an isolated case. An activist LGBT organization had infiltrated our schools under the guise of anti-bullying and non-discrimination policies starting in 2016. They called it a “safe schools” program. This partnership not only helped to start GSA clubs (Gender and Sexuality) and get “safe space” stickers all over the schools, but it also instituted LGBT guides, trained teachers and staff in gender pseudoscience, and instructed teachers and counselors to hide sex confusion from parents.

This effort wasn’t isolated to Florida. This activism blueprint was used all over the United States. The result was a steady erosion of parental rights that most parents were not aware of, including me.

Our research also led us to discover the irreversible medical pathway onto which our daughter had been led. The social transition of a child is not a neutral or benign intervention. It’s a psychosocial intervention, and the first step toward medical intervention. When we pulled back the curtain of so-called “gender affirming care,” we were horrified to learn that the medical and psychological protocol was to affirm these children in any identity they chose and then prescribe them puberty blockers, drugs used to chemically castrate sex offenders and treat prostate cancer. Approximately 98% of children who start on puberty blockers move on to cross-sex hormones, the long-term effects of which are as yet unknown. They were also performing irreversible surgical interventions such as double mastectomies on children as young as 12 years old. And here was the most egregious part—it was all based on the child’s self-identification. This ideology had taken over not only my field of psychology and counseling, but also our medical field. “Gender” doctors, who were self-professed experts of this pseudoscience, told parents to “follow the child’s lead.” Where else in medicine do we follow the child’s lead toward irreversible medical harm? This all seemed so insane to me and my husband that we felt like we had entered the twilight zone.

What followed the meeting with the principal was a steady downward spiral of our daughter’s mental health. She was celebrated at school by peers and teachers for her trans-identity, but what they were really celebrating and affirming was her self-hatred. When school officials socially transition children behind the backs of loving parents, what they are doing is a form of parental alienation. They sent her a clear message that our parental authority was no longer wanted or needed and that she should be protected from us, not by us. It created a huge wedge in our relationship. Our daughter hated us. My husband and I were the only ones in her life trying to keep her tethered to reality and to her God-given sex and protect her from the irreversible medical pathway she was now on, but we were demonized by her school and peers. By this time, she had begun talking about puberty blockers, testosterone, and “top-surgery,” a euphemism for a double mastectomy. She spoke about these interventions as if they were akin to getting a piercing or a tattoo. It became clear to my husband and me that she was desperately confused, and she needed us to help her make sense of her confusion and speak truth to her.

The truth is that the concept of gender identity is a theory, a belief, yet schools are teaching it as if it is fact. Teaching children to believe that they can be born in the wrong body destabilizes their identity, and it has no factual basis. Sex confusion is often a symptom of much deeper distress caused by sexual or physical trauma, abandonment issues, or a deep sense of self-loathing. But my profession has become unethical in its approach to this mental health issue. By affirming this delusion, counselors have become negligent in their duty of care. Counselors have an obligation to explore the root causes of sex confusion so as to promote an integrated sense of self in their patients.

As we were walking our daughter through this, I saw many similarities between sexual identity distress and eating disorders. Both contain a grossly distorted sense of one’s body to the point of delusion. Both also cause a disassociation from one’s body, and many children no longer see their bodies as whole and connected. Their bodies are simply pieces to be added or subtracted based on likes and dislikes. It would be considered completely unethical to validate an anorexic’s delusion about her weight and prescribe diet pills and liposuction. This issue is no different. We should be helping those suffering from distress over their sex understand the reality of their bodies and accept and love themselves as integrated whole persons, just as we do with anorexia.

I have also come to realize many parents have abdicated their authoritative role in their family. For too long, parents have been told to trust “the experts” over their own intuition and knowledge when it comes to decisions about their children. When a doctor asks a mother to leave the examining room, she defers against her better judgment or feelings of discomfort. We can no longer afford to outsource the most important job we will ever have to so-called experts. Parents are the experts of their children, and the Bible is clear on the role of the parent. Our children are a gift from God, and Proverbs 22:6 tells us we must “train up a child in the way he should go.” We must take back our parental authority in every institution in our child’s life, and if these institutions don’t recognize us as the primary decision-makers for our child, then we must remove our child from them.

Churches also have a critical role to play when it comes to this destructive ideology. Evil thrives in darkness, and the best way to extinguish it is to expose it to the light. So many parents in our position feel completely abandoned by their church because they were not warned. Or worse, the church was unwilling to stand up and protect the children in their congregations from these lies. Pastors can no longer sit on the sidelines and hope this ideology doesn’t come into their churches. I guarantee it already has. To begin with, children should be taught a Biblical understanding of how and why they were created. They need to understand, as Genesis makes clear, that in his wisdom and love, God created us male and female and that this identity is imprinted on every facet of our person. Surgery and hormones cannot change what is created by design. Parents and children need to be taught that the kind and compassionate thing to do for a person struggling with sexual identity confusion is to stand firm in Biblical truth from a place of love and compassion. We don’t lie to those we love, and we shouldn’t affirm them in a form of self-hatred.

So, what can we do? We must speak the truth. We must recognize that any ideology that puts children at war with their natal bodies is evil. Inoculate your children and grandchildren against it. Embrace and defend your parental authority. If you are not the prime authority figure in your child’s life, someone else will be, and they may not share your values or have a Biblical worldview. If your child falls prey to the lies of gender ideology, take heart. There is still hope. You can parent your child through this identity crisis like you would any other. No one loves their child as much as a parent does and that love, rooted in the enduring truth of creation, will ultimately see you through.