In Some States, Parents Risk Losing Custody for Rejecting Child’s Transgender Identity | Erin Friday

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Erin Friday is an attorney and the co-lead of Our Duty, a parent-led international organization that opposes transgender procedures for minors.

When her daughter was 13 years old, she began identifying as male, and school staff began using a male name and pronouns to address her—without the knowledge or consent of her parents.

When Friday found out, she called the school and told them to stop. A week later, Child Protective Services showed up at her door—followed by the police a day later. No action was taken against Friday, but it was an alarming experience for her.

A few months later, her daughter ran away in the middle of the night. Under normal circumstances, a parent would probably call the police, but Friday didn’t dare to, having heard about parents who had lost custody of their children when they refused to go along with their child’s transgender identity.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, and I can’t make that phone call because I know that there’s already a file open on me, and that Child Protective Services can swoop in at any time and take my child,” Friday said.

“I made a deal that if I could safeguard my daughter from this—which I did—that I would help save other parents and save other children.”

For years now, she has joined the legal fight against school policies that allow social transitioning of minors without parental consent and medical guidelines that support puberty blockers and hormones for minors.

“When have we ever treated a mental illness by cutting off body parts?” Friday says.

In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss the legal battles Friday has been involved in against Child Protective Services and the state of California over the past few years.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Erin Friday, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Erin Friday:

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I want to paint a scenario from your life. Your daughter runs away from home. You’re thinking about calling the police, but you realize you can’t. Child Protective Services has been called on you inappropriately, but you know that if you make that call, you’ll get a black mark on your record and could end up losing her. Tell me about what happened and how it got to that.

Ms. Friday:

It goes back to when I found out that my daughter, who was 13-years-old, just starting high school, was secretly socially transitioned at school, meaning that the school started to call my daughter by a male name and use male pronouns. And when I called the school and told them to stop, that next week, Child Protective Services [CPS] was at my door, and the next day, the police. That was an immediate alert to me that the school wants to know better than to parent my child. And that if I didn’t follow and call my daughter a boy, that Child Protective Services may come and take my child away.

At the time, I really didn’t know how dangerous the situation was. I later learned that parents in southern California had lost custody of their children because she wouldn’t transition her daughter. She wouldn’t call her daughter a male, and CPS took her child. So now I knew that I already had a black mark.

A few months later, my daughter ran away. And the normal thing for a parent to do is to ask law enforcement to help find your child. She’s 13, female, alone at night. It’s two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning. And I can’t make that phone call because I know that there’s already a file opened up on me and that Child Protective Services can swoop in anytime.

Mr. Jekielek:

So many things going through my head, okay, at this moment. Is this a kind of blackmail? How do you describe this scenario that if you don’t basically follow what these people are demanding of you, you might lose your child?

Ms. Friday:

It’s coercion at its highest level. It’s telling a parent that you either need to transition your child or you don’t get to keep your child. It’s forcing a parent to socially transition their child and later medicalize their child. It puts them in the worst position a parent could be in, knowing that the government is coming after you because you believe in biological sex. You want to raise your daughter as a daughter that you know you birthed, and you know no human has ever changed sex. And you have the government telling you, no, you’re abusive. You don’t get to parent your child. The government knows better. This is America. This is insane.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it’s sort of like they messed with the wrong person here. That’s kind of what I’m thinking right now. But tell me a little bit more about your background. I’m just kind of maybe trying to lighten the mood for a moment.

Ms. Friday:

Sure. So I’m no wallflower. I’m a licensed attorney, so I knew what my rights were, and I also wasn’t going to be bullied that easily. So I was very lucky. Child Protective Services did not come back to my house. I think I must have told them seven or eight times during the interview that I was an attorney. So they moved on to other easier prey to take children from other parents who wouldn’t be able to put up such a fight.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, but tell me, like, you decided to not just be happy with the fact that it worked out; you decided to take this head-on.

Ms. Friday:

100 percent. So as soon as I started to learn about the whole picture of gender ideology, that these schools were socially transitioning these kids behind parents’ backs, that the government was promoting this, that young girls were getting their breasts removed as part of this ideology. First, I waited and I said, who’s fighting this? Where is this in the news? I came from the Left. I watched CNN and the New York Times. I didn’t see anything about this.

And so I was waiting for the cavalry to come. I joined all these different groups. I joined the radical feminists, and I started just googling all groups that were fighting this. And I realized that nobody was really fighting for the parents. And I made a deal. I’m not sure who the deal is with, but I made a deal that if I could safeguard my daughter from this, which I did, that I would help save other parents and save other children. And that’s the deal I made five years ago. And I’m a person of my word.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, but okay. Tell me a little bit more about your daughter. What was she, what was her state when this conversation happened? And like when, you know, Child Protective Services was called, was she—

Ms. Friday:

She was isolating like many of these young girls, living virtually through computer avatars. She was going through puberty, not liking the changes that were going on with her body. She cut her long hair, you know, changed from being very feminine to trying to be masculine. Like it was almost kind of comical. She tried to learn how to burp and would forcibly sit with her legs apart, trying to mimic what she thought a male would do. But it really wasn’t funny. She decided that she was a boy and made that pronouncement.

And when she did, right around that time, she went into a deep depression. They go into a deep depression because to believe that you’re transgender is to believe that you are born in the wrong body, that everything is wrong with you. And the only way to be fixed is to go to a surgeon’s office. So it’s a horrible thing for a young girl to believe that she is wrong. And so she had, you know, those thoughts going through her head.

And then on top of it, she’s told that parents who don’t go along with the gender identity of her choosing are bigots, hateful, and don’t care for her. And that’s all over the Internet, that we parents are monsters for not supporting and affirming their children. And do that to a 13-year-old girl who’s going through COVID, isolated, not in school, and depressed. It was horrifying for her and horrifying for our whole family.

Mr. Jekielek:

Did people try to convince you that you were wrong?

Ms. Friday:

Oh, 100 percent. So I think I went to about seven different doctors. All of them advised me to transition her. I couldn’t find anyone who was curious as to why she felt this way. I only found people who told me that she would commit suicide unless I called her a boy. That was it.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s the veracity of that statement?

Ms. Friday:

It’s untrue. That’s been debunked for a long time. It’s used as a cudgel to, again, give parents a Sophie’s Choice: live son, dead daughter. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that, but it’s a lie. These children become depressed and upset with themselves and who they are. They hate the reflection in the mirror because they believe that they’re born wrong.

It’s not because a parent isn’t supporting them in that horrible belief. It’s actually the opposite. It’s hateful and horrible to tell a child they are wrong. And that’s when I think the suicidality really is more prevalent. It is post-transition because they’re not loved as themselves, which is the person in the mirror, not a creation.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. And I mean, I wonder, I haven’t, I wonder, I’m sure there’s someone that’s studied that now. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at that particular body of literature around the issue, but that makes sense to me what you’re saying.

Ms. Friday:

There is literature on it. There’s the NIH study, which followed four gender clinics in the United States, the biggest ones. In the first year, two out of the 315 adolescents killed themselves. Now, these were children who were supported by their parents in their trans identity, were at either UCSF [University of California, San Francisco] or Boston Children’s Hospital, the biggest gender clinics in the country, and they committed suicide. Now, those numbers are often buried. We also have studies out of Sweden and Denmark. The Swedish study went back 30 years and found a 19 times higher suicide rate post-surgical transition. So it’s a very high rate after.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s happening with your daughter now?

Ms. Friday:

Well, she’s very happy in her female body, thank God, and she’s a young adult. She has all her body parts.

Mr. Jekielek:

But it was hard at the beginning. I’m guessing, right? Like, she really believed that she was a boy. I’m trying to understand the process to get to the situation you just described.

Ms. Friday:

They go through it slowly. It’s a very slow process. So it really started when she went to her sex education class in seventh grade, where they planted the seed, where they spent an hour on gender identity in the sex ed curriculum. It was a five-hour course; the last hour was all gender identity. And it had pictures because I looked at it. I looked at the curriculum. It has pictures of a boy’s body with an arrow pointing and saying, girl brain. So it was all based on lies.

So that’s implanted in these kids, and it is reinforced through school, then it’s reinforced through social media. So when a child is distressed and they’re trying to understand what is causing them not to have a big group of friends or why they feel awkward or uncomfortable in their bodies, well, they have an easy answer. It’s because they’re born in the wrong one. And so that is, you know, an easy solution, and you can google this; you can put in, am I trans? and you’ll get a very simple questionnaire. And we’re all trans, by the way, if you know what I mean. You’ll take the test, and you’ll be trans too.

So during COVID and these distressing times, she took on the identity. She moved along the LGBTQ alphabet. They usually do. They start at lesbian, and then they move to non-binary, and then they move to transgender, and then it lands, and then it’s real, and then they go into a spiral, a deep depression, and the anger that these children have towards their parents is almost indescribable. The hate that she tossed my way was excruciating, but you take it as a parent because you know when a child is really angry, it’s a sign of severe depression when they’re yelling at the person who loves them most. It’s not that they hate their parents; it’s that they’re hurting.

But it causes a lot of parents to capitulate because they see their child spiraling down. And then they hear from the medical providers, you must do this. This is the only pathway. This is the way to save your child. So these parents believe it. And I don’t blame them. I mean, they didn’t read the studies I read. It’s a lot of reading. It’s a lot of searching on the internet to actually understand what was going on.

Mr. Jekielek:

And they have some trust in the experts too, right? Somehow you were able to see through that.

Ms. Friday:

Right. When you have the American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP], the largest pediatric society in the country, saying you need to transition these children, who’s the layperson who’s going to compete against that? They’re not. And even doctors just blindly follow that. They don’t think critically. When have we ever treated a mental illness by cutting off body parts? Well, now we do that.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to talk a little bit about, you know, you being sort of activated, you know, realizing there’s this whole, well, this terrible world, right, where children are being harmed, and you kind of, you made the deal. That’s interesting. You decided you were going to dedicate yourself. I think that’s the way to put it. And one of the areas that you’ve decided to dedicate yourself to help these families that have had their children taken by Child Protective Services. Tell me more about, hold this picture. I don’t remember the term, but there’s like a pipeline. Once someone gets pulled, they get pushed into a, maybe you can kind of explain to me what happens once they get taken by Child Protective Services.

Ms. Friday:

First of all, these children are being taught through the internet—and actually I have evidence of school counselors telling children how to use Child Protective Services to get away from their parents who refuse to capitulate and call them another gender. And so once that child then gets into the crosshairs of Child Protective Services, the child can be taken and placed in a temporary foster care family. And I like to call them glitter families or chosen families because these are affirming families. And during that time, they can be investigated just for not calling their child a male or a female name, whichever the child wants.

Once the child is in foster care, there is a Foster Care Bill of Rights in many of the blue states. That Bill of Rights requires that the child be housed based on gender identity, that is, share a bedroom based on gender identity, not their sex. In California, our Child Protective Services goes up to the age of 24. So a 24-year-old male body could be sharing a bedroom with a 13-year-old female body as long as she identifies as a male or vice versa. So we take a child and put them in a very vulnerable position.

The Bill of Rights also allows the child to get sex-rejecting interventions. So now you cast the parents aside. You don’t need consent from the parents anymore. You get child and government consent to cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and name changes. And the parents essentially lose their parental rights to the government as long as those parents refuse to transition their children.

So that’s how it goes. And these children are taught also to make false claims of abuse, not just emotional abuse, but physical abuse. In these cases, we don’t hear about them very often because they underlie many laws. They are sealed or have confidentiality requirements. So nobody knows. The parents can’t even go to the press about what is happening to their child.

Mr. Jekielek:

I understand there are numerous court cases that parents are involved in right now, trying to reclaim their children that are in this situation.

Ms. Friday:

There are quite a few cases across the country in which the parent has sued the child protective agencies or social workers for violating their parental rights. Thus far, those cases have not been that successful. The judges are finding legal technicalities to avoid really adjudicating whether parents have a right to raise their child as their sex. That’s what the question is. Do parents have the right to raise their children as their sex, how they were born, how they were made naturally?

So there are lawsuits going on across the country, but this is happening in red states and blue states. Georgia has a case going on, and it’s very difficult for these parents to keep fighting for the trans-identified child, too. These parents are bankrupt. They are asked to jump through hoops. They are required to be re-educated and go through training. And as that’s happening, the clock is ticking.

And that child is getting more indoctrinated because the child is being placed with a family or in an institution where they’re being affirmed as the opposite sex, and the clock is ticking. So that child is aging, and there’s an end time when the child is now an adult. So there’s nothing left except tears for these parents. And then there are other instances where a parent,

I know a mother in Oregon, I think she has four children. She had Child Protective Services open three separate investigations against her because of her trans-identified daughter, who eventually ran away. But Child Protective Services still went after her because the child had run away. The police would not return the child to her. But she has this one child; she would lose the others.

So this mother, sorry, this is going to get emotional. This mother emancipated, relinquished her parental rights to this trans-identified daughter to save her other three children. And that is horrifying. She sacrificed her one daughter to the transgender cult so that she could safeguard her other children. And that should never be, never be.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why do you call it the transgender cult?

Ms. Friday:

Because that’s exactly what it is. It has all of the attributes of a cult, except there is no one supreme leader. The supreme leader is self. So a cult, what does a cult do? It indoctrinates you with mantras. Trans women are women. Trans kids, you know, deserve rights. So you have, you know, these mantras. You have forced education. You have the pulling away of the family. I mean, that’s the biggest thing from a cult, right? Separate the people who truly love the victim and separate them. You know, create a new family, a new community for them.

And then the supreme leader is self in this cult because trans-identified people want you, want the parents to all speak the way they want you to speak. You must recognize that that man is actually a woman, that that woman is actually a man. You must change your language. You must use my pronouns. You must look at me differently. You must allow me into your bathrooms, into your sacred spaces. It’s a cult, and you know, it’s a social contagion through the cult.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me a little bit more about this social contagion aspect. I mean, it’s been covered. Abigail Shrier has written on it quite a bit, but do you know at this point, as we’re recording, what the status of that contagion is? Because during COVID, there was sort of an explosion of it, if I recall, right?

Ms. Friday:

Yes. So there’s been some reporting that there’s been a dip. There’s at least a dip in youth saying that they’re non-binary. But I don’t see any slowing down of the trans identity whatsoever. The social contagion is rampant, and it started first with the girls, which is normally how social contagions work. Anorexia, bulimia, we know this going back to the laughing social contagion, the dancing social contagion, hysteria. It always started with the young girls because they want to be liked, they’re easily influenced, and then it moves over to the boys, which is where we are now. But it’s continuing. They want the social contagion to continue.

This is why they have trans-identified cartoon characters. This is why Disney has it. This is why it’s on cereal boxes. This is why they’re teaching it in pre-K and kindergarten. They want to keep building gender-confused children because it’s a steady stream of money, and it’s a massive way to blow up the family because that’s what it does; it destroys the family, so that’s okay.

Mr. Jekielek:

Interesting, you mentioned a few kinds of motivational factors here. One is the destruction of the family. That’s super interesting because that’s like a core communist goal, right? A sort of, you know, the state asserts control. You mean, okay, what did you mention? You mentioned the family, mentioned money, right? And there’s also this element of just, you know, manifesting the ideology that you’ve come to believe, I guess that would be another one, right?

Ms. Friday:

Well, when we look at the why—why is this happening?—there it’s very multifaceted. The easiest one to understand is money. We know that these children are worth lots of money to the medical communities. I think in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University admitted it. These are cash cows. These children are perpetual medical patients.

Mr. Jekielek:

I remember, okay, let me just jump in. I remember seeing these transcripts, right? That’s shocking to me. Can you just explain what happened? What did they admit to? Like, how did they admit?

Ms. Friday:

They talked about how lucrative gender clinics are. Let me put this in perspective: Lupron, which is a puberty blocker that is surgically inserted into a child’s arm to prevent them from growing up, can cost up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to insert. Hospitals, you know, profit margins are very, very, very razor thin. $150,000 to insert a puberty blocker into a child, and then repeat visits, and then you put them on cross-sex hormones, and then you have surgeries. I mean, these children are worth a lot of money.

And then all the harms that come from that, because there are many, even if the child doesn’t detransition. There’s a lot of things that happen to the body when you put females on male-level testosterone. Cancers emerge. So they are always paying dividends to the medical community. So the money’s there for these surgeons and for these hospitals. And they knew it. And they ran with it. It’s a good profit center. And our government paid for it with Medicaid.

Mr. Jekielek:

Until recently.

Ms. Friday:

That’s right, but in California, we’re still paying for this.

Mr. Jekielek:

I just remembered something. You mentioned something earlier, the term that people might not be familiar with, and you said, sex rejecting, and I think you’re referring to sex-rejecting procedures. This terminology, I think Bobby Kennedy first used in his address when they introduced this new report, the umbrella study on all the studies on gender dysphoria treatment and so forth. So this terminology is not something I’d heard before. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Ms. Friday:

We wanted to take back some of the language because the language has been manipulated. Gender-affirming care? Brilliant. Gender-affirming care, it has a nice ring to it, that we all have a gender. Sorry, but I don’t believe any of us have a gender or a gender soul. We have a sex. We are sexed human beings. That’s it.

So we wanted to find terms, especially lawyers; we have to be very careful about how these judges are coming down with these rulings. There’s no such thing as a trans child. I don’t use that terminology because it’s fiction, and it makes it real. So there’s no such thing as gender-affirming care. There’s only sex-rejecting care, which is rejecting that you are a male or a female, what you actually are. And you’re trying to make your body mimic the opposite sex. So it makes perfect sense to use the right terminology so people can hear it. You’re rejecting your body. You’re not affirming anything. You’re rejecting.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you know, you’re, of course, in California, as you just mentioned, there’s been a pretty significant shift in how the federal government approaches this issue. I’m just wondering if you could tell me what has shifted. And then the second part will be, what impact has that had at the level at which you operate?

Ms. Friday:

Thank God for President Trump. Never thought those words would come out of my mouth, but here we are. I’m super appreciative of what this administration is doing. So the federal government, for the Department of Ed, the Department of Education, has come down very hard on California for Title IX violations.

Now, we’re all in litigation with this, so we’ll see where it goes, but we’re very likely to be successful in withholding federal dollars because California allows men to be in our bathrooms and in our sports. So that’s one big thing that the administration has done. Because of the administration’s executive orders, we’ve had a lot of gender clinics at hospitals shut down.

Now, on paper, that is a huge win, and I don’t want to underestimate it; we want to celebrate that. But these doctors have just moved over and put up shingles elsewhere. So they’re still doing it; they’re just doing it not connected to a hospital. The DOJ is investigating California for some of these false medical ICD [International Classification of Diseases] codes that they’re using to hide the fact that they’re performing sex-rejecting interventions on children.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re going to have to lay that out for me a little bit more. So it’s something to do with how the procedure is being described, but it’s just being described fraudulently. Can you just unpack that for me?

Ms. Friday:

That’s correct. So they’ll put a code in for a woman and say that he, even though it’s a female, is not producing enough testosterone and is, you know, testosterone deficient, and use a code for that. Well, that’s not true because women are not supposed to have that level of testosterone. They will use codes such as endocrine disorder unspecified to give a child puberty blockers. to hide the fact that they’re blocking a child’s puberty because that child or parent believes that that child is a different sex.  So they’re manipulating data and that’s illegal, and the federal government is going to come down hard and swift on that.

The Federal Trade Commission [FTC] had a roundtable in July where they allowed all of us to come and speak and talk about all the fraud and deception, and we’re waiting for the FTC to start moving on it. But we parents and other advocates have been stockpiling evidence for a very long time. And we finally get to share it because it is a lie that gender interventions are life-saving. That is a lie. It is a lie that they are medically necessary.

And that’s the purview of the FTC: you cannot do that. You cannot say that a treatment is life-saving when it’s not. Some of this is being litigated, and some of it is beginning. So the FTC, I think, served 20-plus subpoenas on different genders. And they’re following through with the gender piece. And they’re using every tool at their disposal to shut this down, even in blue states.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you. You’ve mentioned, of course, there’s a whole bunch of litigation that is now happening at the state level based on what the federal government wants to be doing in California and a host of other states. But let’s talk about California because that’s your jurisdiction, let’s say, or your prime jurisdiction. What impact has that had on what’s happening on the ground in California?

Ms. Friday:

Well, it has, first of all, lit a fire under parents who used to be more frightened to speak up, but they’re speaking up and they’re filing more lawsuits and they’re calling school boards to task for socially transitioning their children. So we see a big shift on that level. We see at least parents now getting more in the news, seeing more in the news that they don’t have to just transition their child if their child is suffering from gender confusion. So we see a lot of that.

And it’s a lot more fun. I mean, I have to admit it. I go to Sacramento. I’ve been going to Sacramento for four straight years and losing. And it’s very fun to testify on some of the California bills and let them know that this is what’s happening with the federal government. And it’s not as simple as this, but I can pick up the phone and tell the federal government this is what’s happening here in California. And they’re reacting.

Mr. Jekielek:

Basically, you have some leverage that you didn’t have before. Absolutely. Absolutely. For a moment earlier, you sounded like you weren’t hopeful. I’m just because this sounds hopeful. You just told me, right? But before you said, I don’t see the levels of this changing.

Ms. Friday:

There’s been some reporting that the number of children or adolescents saying they’re non-binary has dropped and that the social contagion is at its peak and starting to come down. I don’t see the number of kids saying they’re trans-identified dropping. The non-binary is different because there were a lot of kids who took on that label because they wanted to be in the oppressed bucket. So they really didn’t have an issue with their sexual identity. They just wanted to be part of that club.

That club isn’t as cool anymore, but they’re still indoctrinating these young kids. And the children that fall prey to this, they’re autistic. They tend to fall into this bucket. I can truly have, and I have parents call me, and all they have to do is tell me the sex of their child and the age of their child, and I can pretty much tell their story because it’s all the same. It’s different for boys.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s different? Okay, so what is that story?

Ms. Friday:

So for the girls, if it’s a young girl, it falls into a pattern. She has ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder], may be autistic, not a lot of time on the internet. So those are the girls. And as part of a friend group where the friends are also non-binary, trans, whatever they are, or maybe lesbian. For the boys, the boys take on a different—everything’s binary.

Really, the boys are different. Many of the boys have genius IQs. They have autism, usually Asperger’s syndrome, I don’t know the term they use now, but they’re very, very intelligent. Never had a girlfriend, socially awkward, very into computers, very mathematically minded.

And then we have the older females, who tend to be the same-sex attracted women who just want to go through life instead of being a masculine-looking female, have shame and decide that they are actually male. Because it’s easier sometimes to go through life as a male than it is a female who has male attributes. So they all fall into different buckets. And there’s certainly a pattern.

I actually had 150 parents write letters to the American Academy of Pediatrics trying to get them to stop their policy and at least take a look at it, do a systematic review. And what I didn’t know, I had all the parents cc me on the emails that they sent to the AAP. And then I put together a chart of the stories of the parents to match them up. And the patterns are very clear. I mean, it’s not scientific, but the patterns are really clear about who got caught in the net. It’s not the child who is playing sports and has a whole group of friends. And there’s a pattern.

Mr. Jekielek:

With respect to these lawsuits involving the removals by Child Protective Services, you said they’re not necessarily going well. What do you think is going to happen with this space?

Ms. Friday:

At this point? Oh, that’s where I come in. So a group of attorneys and I have been working tirelessly on writing some legislation that will make it easier for parents to sue these child welfare agencies and the attorneys who represent their children and the social workers who are promoting this and unfairly investigating them. So we’re hoping that this legislation will help in these lawsuits and then stop what is happening.

We are also working to try to get the federal government to use its power through the HHS [U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services] because the HHS funds close to 50 percent of all of these Child Protective Services agencies. So the federal government has the power to say we are no longer going to fund you if you are taking children from otherwise fit parents.

And, which is really important, we are no longer going to fund the training that all these social workers are going through that trains them that parents like me are abusive. There’s money going to the training of judges in the same way. So the gender ideologues have been training judges for decades.

Mr. Jekielek:

It sounds like this is sort of embedded in almost every aspect. I mean, this is why there’s a pipeline, I guess, as you would call it, right?

Ms. Friday:

Every institution has been invaded by gender ideology, and we have to root it out.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so a starting point for you is this kind of legislation.

Ms. Friday:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s the name of your group?

Ms. Friday:

We’re a coalition, but I’m the president of our duty, and I’m working with other attorneys in this space, a retired judge who worked in dependency and family court. So it’s very nice to have an expert, but we’re trying to figure out the easiest way and the quickest way because I get a phone call a month from a parent saying that they’re losing custody of their child because they won’t transition them. I have parents that I tell them to run. If Child Protective Services come knocking on your door and you live in a blue state, get in your car and drive as quickly as you can to Florida or Texas, but do not remain in Oregon or Washington. You will not win. You will lose your child.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, it’s difficult to fathom. I mean, very difficult to fathom.

Ms. Friday:

It’s insane. This is the United States, and we have parents having to flee with their children. I even had a family flee to Poland. She asked, where can I go? And she said, I can go back to Poland. I said, go. You need to leave. You’re not going to beat this behemoth. The courts are against you. They are. And it’s not as if the judges are bad people.

They are trained also to follow just what the social worker says, follow what Child Protective Services says. I mean, they’re going through hundreds of cases. Let me read you this recommendation. This is from an actual case in Colorado. This is the recommendation for Child Protective Services to these parents of a child who thinks that she is a boy.

The requirement is that the parent and family will be affirming of the child’s chosen gender identity. Forced transition. The parent will not make any negative comments regarding the child’s gender expression about her wearing male clothing. The parent will allow the child to go to a friend’s house if he feels he needs space from home. The parent and child will attend family therapy to better understand and navigate the child’s transition. And the parent will visit the rainbow youth center to be educated about the minor’s gender transition and get resources for the minor.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the rainbow youth center?

Ms. Friday:

These are these nonprofits. We talk about the nonprofit in Minnesota with all the child care. Well, there are all these nonprofits in the United States that push gender ideology. Again, they’re being funded by the federal government and by state governments. These are indoctrination centers, and they are there to teach the parent that you are bad unless you transition your child.

So this is our government telling the parents you must transition your child or you may not get your child back. This is real. This is Colorado. I have one from Oregon. I have one from California. I can get them from every state. This is what they write.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. What does Our Duty do?

Ms. Friday:

That’s a really good question. We are a jack of all trades. We look at ourselves as connectors. So we are not a parent support group. So when a parent wants to talk about their feelings and their distress, we send them elsewhere. We connect them with attorneys. We help get them into advocacy, teach them how to testify in their state against state legislation, what letters to write, how to safeguard their children, what to say to school boards.

We write amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in various districts to give voice to the parents’ stories. We also have what I would call an underground railroad of therapists that we met out to these parents who are looking for non-affirming therapists. So we do a lot.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and just, so there’s something implicit here to what you said. We didn’t really discuss this as much in this interview as I have in the past, but there’s just a significant portion of therapists, child therapists, who will just affirm as part of their training, right?

Ms. Friday:

Correct, yes. There is a large portion of therapists, depending on what state they live in, where the law tells them that they must affirm. And so there are therapists who won’t do that, but then they won’t take on these clients because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their license. We have a Supreme Court case going on right now that will determine whether these so-called anti-conversion therapy laws are legal or not.

So in Colorado, California, and a bunch of liberal states, therapists are only allowed to affirm a child’s gender identity; they’re not allowed to question it. So basically, Our Duty is a one-stop shop. If you’re in any way kind of intersecting into this gender ideology, gender medicine field, and you need help, you guys will find the right person for you if it’s not you. That’s correct.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. How do people find Our Duty?

Ms. Friday:

Our website is ourdutyusa.org

Mr. Jekielek:

Fantastic. So incredible conversation here. A final thought as we finish?

Ms. Friday:

I’m very hopeful now that I sit in D.C. that the White House and Congress are going to continue to safeguard children and look at parents like us, like me, as the best parents and help support us because we need them. And stop forgetting about the blue states. Blue states need help. And the only help that we’re going to get is from the federal government.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Erin Friday, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Ms. Friday:

Thank you so much.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.