I've heard people compare this ideology to a cult, which I definitely see a lot of cold character traits in this. I've heard people compare this to the fascism and totalitarianism movements that we've seen in the past, and I think there's a lot of that in it.
But ultimately this is even bigger than any of those things because this isn't happening in one cult community. This isn't happening in one state, it's not happening in one country, it's not happening on one continent even. This is global.
The transgender craze is growing and metastasizing in America and across the world. Confusion is abounding, and while Western cultures celebrate and elevate it, the costs are quickly mounting. From a loss of parental rights to botched and destroyed young lives, this movement leaves little room for apathy.
I'm Brandon Showalter, a journalist with the Christian Post, and in the last few years I've been covering the developments of the so-called gender identity movement.
In this five part investigative podcast series, we'll take you through parents' heartbreaking stories. We'll explore the chaotic state of our education system in the United States and the overtly sinister actions and craven cowardice of our institutions. We'll also explore the history of how we got to where we are and so much more.
In this inaugural episode, we'll tackle how some of our schools have become indoctrination centers for gender ideology and the dire impact that this is having on families. We'll begin with January Littlejohn, a mother from Florida, whose harrowing story I learned about last year.
January, if we could just to begin here, explain how you as a mom down in Florida, first encountered this gender ideology in the schools. What happened with your family?
Absolutely. So at the height of the pandemic, my daughter told my husband and myself that she was experiencing confusion over her sex. This was after three friends in her in-person peer group at school had also suddenly started claiming a trans identity. And so we were immediately concerned, completely caught off guard. My daughter had never experienced distress over her sex leading up to this announcement. And like many teens during this time of the schools shut down and the height of the pandemic, she was experiencing anxiety and stress like many of the other teens in these situations.
When schools started, after a few weeks into school, my daughter got into the car and told me she had a meeting with school officials where they asked her which restroom she wanted to use. Now, my husband and I both knew that she wanted to go by a different name and different pronouns, but we were working with a mental health professional. We thought given the other mental health issues she was experiencing at the time that that needed to be our focus.
January and her husband were understandably angry after finding out about this meeting. But when they called the school, she said administrators told her that they couldn't give them any information and that their daughter who was 13 at the time would need to authorize her parents' notification. That's when January started pushing even harder for answers.
I was floored when they told me this. They told me my only recourse was to contact the assistant superintendent at the district, which I did. And after many weeks of going back and forth with the district, we finally were able to get a meeting with the principal of the middle school because my daughter was only 13 at the time. And we were shown a transgender gender nonconforming support plan that was completed with our 13 year old daughter without our knowledge or consent.
This was a six page document, completed with her behind closed doors that included the guidance counselor, the assistant principal, and a social worker I had never met. And in this guide, they asked her questions that could have absolutely significantly impacted her safety, such as which restroom she preferred to use, and which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips, in addition to being allowed to change her name and pronouns.
Ms. Littlejohn went on to explain that this secretive gender support plan also dictated how teachers and others would help socially transition her daughter, putting the onus of responsibility and decisions on her, the confused child at the center of the chaos.
The plan also directs school staff. They essentially put the burden on the minor child, not only to determine whether or not parents will be included in these meetings, which is essentially social transitioning of a child. But it also directed school staff to use my daughter's birth name and pronouns when speaking to us, her parents, and to use a different name in school with staff, students and friends.
So that essentially we would never even had known this meeting had taken place. They are colluding and collaborating with minor children to exclude parents from these critical decisions that will impact their health and wellbeing at school.
Many may wonder how in the world such a scenario could happen in which schools circumvent parents in this way. I asked attorney, Vernadette Broyles, who represents the Littlejohn family, "How is this even legal?"
It's not, and that's why we filed a federal lawsuit. And there are lawsuits that are beginning to be filed in states around the country, and it's demonstrably not legal in the state of Florida.
Number one, well throughout the country, there's the Supreme Court of the United States has for many decades recognized a constitutional liberty interest in right for parents to be able to direct the upbringing, mental healthcare, medical care, education, religious training of their children without state interference. That's long established law. Even under Florida constitution, the parents again had a Florida constitutional right to directly upbringing to the parents. So it is not legal.
And what the activists are doing is attempting to operate underneath the radar and be doing these things without parents knowing about it in hopes that they don't find out about it. And once they do, then they're attempting to distort federal law to say that the federal law creates a privacy right in children against their own parents. That is not the law.
January Littlejohn's situation is unfortunately not an isolated one. Parents around the country are now finding themselves locked in contentious battles with individual schools and district officials as they navigate this gender crisis.
Tiffany Justice who served as a school board member from 2016 to 2020 in Indian River County, Florida, was so troubled by what she saw happening that she co-founded a group called Moms for Liberty to defend parental rights across America.
We deal with moms almost every day whose children are either captured in some way by gender identity indoctrination, or gender dysphoria, or also schools that are intervening in really inappropriate ways with children outside of the consent and knowledge of parents. And so that's been our experience, just very concerned parents about the future of their children and some very, very confused children.
Clinton and Erin Thomas are two such parents who have faced pushback for speaking out after their daughters became uncomfortable with the ways in which gender identity indoctrination was rolled out in Loudon County, Virginia.
In the to lead up to the 2021 election cycle, this Washington D.C. area, excerpt county in Northern Virginia became an epicenter of the debate over gender ideology in the schools.
I would say that it was really the first day of this past school year, when we heard from our daughters who came home that first day that they had been asked openly in class and through different surveys in class that day from different teachers that they were asked to declare their pronouns.
Together with his wife Erin, they called the school principal to complain and explain that this sort of thing wouldn't be acceptable. But having the students declare their pronouns was only the start of the family's concern. As Loudon County Public School board officials approved and adopted Policy 8040 last year. This policy set forth new rules requiring teachers to use students self-selected pronouns and to allow students who identified as the opposite sex to use the restroom of their choice.
We noticed that our girls were coming home saying they were concerned about using a bathroom now, because now you have boys that may come into those girls' restrooms, and so they just decided to hold it for the day. Or I would ask, "How come your water bottle's still full?" And they said, "We just decided not to drink anything today."
So you call the principal on the first day after your daughters are forced to declare their pronouns. What was it like then slowly waking up to realize that this had infested and infected everything? And how was it interfacing with school officials, bureaucrats, board members, anybody who's in charge?
Our calls at first were well received. It was met by school administration, the principal in particular as, "Thank you for sharing your concerns. I'm going to be dealing with this. I'll discuss with my staff." And we don't really hear after that what happened. But then it slowly became obvious that they didn't really care what we thought. Emails weren't returned, FOAs were denied.
Giving you the brush off?
Brush off, and essentially, "Well, sorry. This is very important for the health and welfare of all of our students." And it never was implied. I was never called a bigot or racist myself, but it was sort of implied like, "Don't worry. We're trying to protect all students here." And it was just basically cast off.
Parents like the Thomas's are increasingly finding themselves at odds with school officials if and when they question any of the gender rituals or the content that's [inaudible 00:10:29] their kids. But that's not a surprise.
Tiffany Justice, who together with tens of thousands of moms are working to empower parents to reclaim their rights.
Any time a parent expresses any type of concern about anything related to this issue, they're being told that they're what? A bigot, that somehow they don't love and respect all children. Well, I'll be the first one to tell you, my child does not need a sexual spirit guide. I birthed that child, I carried them, I've raised them, I breastfed them. I know them better than anyone else.
That's what American parents are saying. "I love my child. I accept them as who they are, but stop messing with my kids and putting ideas into their head because you went through something in your life and you're living vicariously through kids."
At the root of the transgender movement and the ideology that undergirds it is in fact a denial of the material reality of biological sex. And that has Amy Sousa, who has a master's degree in depth psychology, deeply concerned. Formerly an education director at a small regional theater in Washington State, her graduate and post-graduate work focused on the creative imagination and eco psychology as a basis for building embodied awareness.
Amid an internet fueled peer contagion, young impressionable children, especially girls, are being presented with gender ideals that confuse and confound them, and the results are tragic.
What we see in this ideology of "gender identities" is ultimately an ideology of sex denialism. And when we look at the underlying values of those who want to have unsexed, unmoored from their bodies identities, ultimately we're looking at a value set of disembodiment, and dismemberment, and dissociation, and cognitive dissonance, and objectification, and commodification of bodies.
These things are antithetical to being fully embodied. And the thing is to have safeguarding, in order to have bodily autonomy and safeguarding and boundaries around your body, you need to know the difference between bodies. And so what we are seeing happening in schools with the curriculum and also with how locker rooms, and bathrooms, and changing rooms are being designated, we are seeing a failure of safeguarding and a failure of boundary setting, because these kids are being taught first of all, that they can feel like a boy or feel like a girl.
As you probably know Amy, the statistics are showing that the most vulnerable groups, the most predominant demographic who are now experiencing what they're calling gender dysphoria, this severe incongruence with one's biological sex are teenage girls and young women who we know are vulnerable to social contagions. That this is explored more fully in Abigail Shrier's book, Irreversible Damage.
Could you explain why this is so bad? Again, we know it's bad for boys and girls, but why is this particularly destructive for young girls, especially if they're struggling already?
When you are in a disembodied state, you are kind of a vacant house. And the metaphor of the vacant house goes a little something like this. If there is a vacant house at the end of the block, and it might have a giant, massive barbed wire fence around it, and yet you are going to see that kids are going to break in and hold their parties there, drug dealers are going to break in and hold their business there. Kids are going to throw bottles through the window. People are going to litter over the yard, because despite the massive barrier, everyone can see that the house, it's a vacant house.
Contrast that with a house on the other side of the block that the grass is mowed, the lights are on, there's curtains in the window, there's flowers in the planter blocks. This house doesn't have a fence at all, and yet no one violates it because everyone can see that someone is managing and caring for the house. It's fully occupied.
So we are putting kids and especially girls in a state of dissociation and disembodiment, and we are ultimately setting them up to be like this vacant house where they might put up a lot of barriers, but they don't have this sense of internal authority.
In many ways, schools have become ground zero in the cultural clash over so-called gender identity policies. Parents are learning that the ideological instruction in the schools are part of a much larger operation, and the classroom is one of the first places in the pipeline toward gender clinics where counselors and doctors are carrying out experimental medicalization on young people, many of whom are on the autism spectrum or are dealing with other significant mental health challenges.
But the statutes and legal age of consent vary state by state. One of the most pervasive myths often perpetuated here is that administering chemical puberty blockers to psychologically distressed children is a completely safe and reversible practice, or that there are no lasting harms. But in most cases, what often follows blockers are synthetic opposite sex hormones, and some then opt for a medically unnecessary cosmetic gender surgery.
But as Tiffany notes, story after story shows the dire realities that must be confronted.
This idea that somehow this isn't going to have long-term negative effects for the child is wrong. It's a lie. And when you listen and read the stories of people that have gone through this process, that have had their breasts removed, my goodness, what a 11, 12 year old, 13 year old girl can be making that decision to have their breasts removed, to go through cross sex hormones and to take puberty blockers, to stop puberty and the long-term health effects of that and the lifespan of a person, to take it to the next step as far as what really does seem to be genital mutilation, the idea that you would somehow cut off genitals or try to reinvent or create a vagina on a boy.
Just these things are things that are, it sound like horrible medical experiments that leave children really... And as a mom and a wife and a woman who has a really great marriage, people laugh at me because I'll say, I think having an intimate sexual relationship with your partner is a wonderful part of... Having a marriage and a relationship, but that's not even an option for these children when they grow up.
January Littlejohn concurs, and after her own horrible experience with her daughter's school, she's now sounding the alarm on the quote unquote, affirmation only approach that many institutions have embraced. She's warning of the life altering impact, one that can literally destroy children's sexual futures.
These only affirming protocols, complicit in this social contagion were seen. But now you have schools actively teaching children that they can be born in the wrong body, that they choose their gender identity which can be completely separate from their biological sex. And what this is doing is it really is creating confusion in these children where there was no previous confusion. We are literally manufacturing children who are confused about their sex, and this is being normalized as a healthy part of development, and that could not be further from the truth.
As a parent, when I started to peel back the layers of what affirmation only treatment meant, you start to see the horrors of children becoming lifelong medical patients on experimental puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that will ultimately sterilize children and destroy their sexual function.
For many, the idea that schools are actually doing this sounds tinfoil hat crazy, and the alarming implications of what this causes in children often elicits a kind of analysis paralysis. "It can't be that bad, can it?" But the evidence is pouring in particularly as those who were indoctrinated in the schools and then went on to undergo the experimental gender medicalization wind up with regret.
Parent advocate Natassia Grover of Loudon County, Virginia, told me about one heartbreaking de transition example that shows why understanding these issues is so necessary.
Well, one thing that astonished me was back in, I think it was January, 2019, I went to it was kind of like a conference slash protest or something like that going on in D.C. Feminists held a event at a library in D.C. There were different feminist panelists speaking about this particular issue. And during the Q and A part, a girl stood up, she's maybe 19 years old, and told her story. She was a graduate from the Loudoun County Public Schools, and she got caught up into the whole LGBTQ crowd who became her glitter family. And they were just so supportive of her whole gender identity stuff going on. She ended up identifying as trans.
And by the time she was 18, she had her breasts removed. It wasn't shortly thereafter, maybe a year later, because by now she was 19 speaking to us. She said she had detransitioned, and she realized she was a lesbian and a radical feminist instead of... When she detransitioned, she said she lost all of her, presumably her Loudon County glitter family, fellow students and whatnot, because obviously she was bucking their whole worldview.
In addition to these horrors, some families are being literally torn apart by this ideology. Tiffany shared with me one of the most heartbreaking stories that she'd ever heard about when parents try to stop their children from traveling down this path.
In March of this year, she heard the story of Abigail Martinez, who is originally from El Salvador and now resides in the Los Angeles area. Abigail's daughter Yaeli died by suicide after a state social services agency removed her from her mother's custody so that the teenager could undergo the experimental hormones.
Listening to a mom who was out in California who told us really what it was like to have a child who was indoctrinated in a school, have child protective services take that child then from her because she wasn't willing to affirm medically. And then listening to this mom tell a story about her daughter, and how she knew her daughter wasn't okay. And she knew that the hormone therapy or the cross-sex hormones and the medical affirmation of this transgender, gender dysphoria that her daughter was experiencing wasn't going to help her daughter feel better because her daughter was dealing with a lot of other issues.
Just listening to a mom who knew her daughter, who knew that her daughter was depressed and was dealing with other mental health issues. Listening to that mom and knowing in my heart as a mom that you know your kids, and then hearing that mom say that her daughter killed herself, and that she woke up that day with a pit in her stomach and she needed to talk to her daughter. She knew something wasn't right.
And meanwhile, this daughter had been removed from her home and had basically been told that her mom was a threat to her that was allowing her to be her real self. And so to listen to a mom talk about her daughter kneeling in front of a train and taking her own life.
The battle over our schools and parental rights has never been more pertinent. And as moms and dads flood school board meetings with their grievances and begin demanding answers about what's being taught in the classroom, it's clear that one thing is essential, engagement, both inside the home and in the community. Erin Thomas encourages parents to insist upon getting accurate information out of the school boards and for parents to make their voices heard. But it all starts at home.
I would just say pay attention. Talk to your kids, ask questions. Sit around the dinner table. What'd you do in advisory today? Were there any special assemblies? What's on the walls of the schools? Let's look at your textbooks. Let's look at your computers, anything, and just share information with other parents. Because what? There were many times that our kids may have not noticed something, but another parent did.
Attorney Vernadette Broyles agrees urging parents to take back the mantle of leadership in their families.
Our children are having an identity crisis because parents have been having an identity crisis. We need to reacquire who we are. We are the authorities that both God and law have given over children because we love them the most. We know them the best. And so we have that responsibility to guard them and to guide them into a healthy adulthood. And so therefore, reacquire our identity as the authority figures in their lives that we are. And then communicate that to your school, to their teachers, to their principals, and whomever else is necessary.
There is, of course, another issue we must contend with before we conclude this episode. What do parents do if they face a situation in which their child identifies as transgender? January, who is weathered this very thing offered her insight.
So many parents in this situation, they freeze. They are terrified to parent their child when their child expresses a transgender identity. And what I will tell you from personal experience is these children do not understand many times what they are asking for, what they are stating. They are simply regurgitating propaganda that they have been taught.
And so I encourage parents in this situation that you have to parent this issue and set healthy, appropriate boundaries just like you would in any other situation, like if your child was asking for a tattoo or a piercing that you cannot approve of. Because a lot of these parents are terrified at what's going to happen long-term, but especially if your child is young and they are still under your roof. You have to recognize your parental authority, not just in the school system, but in your home.
You have to parent this issue like you would any other issue out of love and unconditional love that you have for your child. That is how parents in these situations have gotten their children to desist and move along a path of self-love and acceptance instead of confirming and affirming the self-loathing that we see when children are captured by this ideology,
Our children matter, which is why this issue desperately needs more attention, understanding, and scrutiny.
In episode two of Generation Indoctrination, we'll explore several dimensions of the medical malfeasance at the center of transgender ideology. Stay tuned.