transcript of Brandon Showalter’s presentation
Survivors’ Summit, Ruth Institute’s annual conference, Lake Charles, Louisiana
Good afternoon, everyone. I’m honored to be here today and as Dr. Morse said, I’m Brandon Showalter and I’ve been a journalist at The Christian Post in Washington, DC since the summer of 2016, and I’ve been invited here to share what it’s been like reporting from the front lines on the topic of transgenderism.
I fell down the gender identity rabbit hole, as I like to call it, soon after I started as a full-time reporter. I wasn’t so familiar with these issues except that I’d heard a few things about bathrooms in 2015 and I knew about transvestites at Mardi Gras in New Orleans and that a few folks had undergone these body-altering surgeries. But that was about the extent of it.
Yet in early 2017, when I found out about the marked shift toward all things trans within contemporary LGBT politics and the experimental medicalization of gender that was being pushed on minors, specifically what puberty blockers were, I was a changed man. Life was never the same after that. When I was confronted with the reality that doctors in America were actually trying to chemically suppress the normal pubertal processes as though they were a diseases to cured, under the guise of alleviating gender confusion, a psychological condition, something inside me just sort of snapped. Incidentally, this issue quickly became one of my “beats” as we have in the news business.
I subsequently learned that since 2007 dozens of gender clinics have sprung up around the country with breakneck speed and the ideology that undergirds these sordid outfits has basically taken over every realm of culture, especially law, medicine and education. This has been brewing for decades, in fact, but it has exploded in the past 5-10 years. And many Planned Parenthood offices are essentially gender clinics of a sort as they are now a leading provider of cross-sex hormones for people who identify as transgender or non-binary.
The most important thing to understand about this neo-Gnostic transgender ideology, aside from it’s grotesque misogyny, is that is none of it is based in material reality, none of it’s rooted in objective truth. Thus, there are many, many victims. And the harms of this pathological creed are truly horrifying.
In short, we are destroying an entire generation of young people and wrecking our society in service to utterly insane ideas that prioritize the physically impossible goals of a few personality-disordered individuals who are under the ferocious delusion that by their say-so they somehow are the opposite sex.
Before I get too deep in let me just say two things from the outset. 1) Human beings cannot change sex, they never have been able to, they never will be. 2) Men, women, and children who have psychiatric problems where gender confusion and distress is an issue, deserve nothing less than our sincerest compassion.
But that is an entirely different issue than the radical ideology that is presently rampaging across our communities.
Sometimes I get asked why I care so much about this. I can say it no better than Colin Wright has said it. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist, certainly not a Christian, who has spoken out about the nature of biological sex and the dangerous denial of it in prominent forums like the Wall Street Journal. In early March, he posted on Twitter that he considers this subject “reality’s last stand. If this undeniable fact can be denied en masse, then we become hostages to chaos. We simply cannot afford to lose our collective tether to reality.”
He’s not overstating it. In the course of covering on this topic, I could share with you many examples of how transgenderism turns everything it touches to ash.
I could tell you about how girls and women’s sports are being eroded. Because boys can now self-identify as female despite retaining all the physiological advantages that male puberty confers, they can participate and compete in female athletics, take their titles, break their records, steal scholarship opportunities, and ruin everything Title IX has enabled women and girls to achieve since 1972.
I could tell you about how transgenderism is sowing chaos and confusion in the area of vital statistics and public record keeping because, in most states and cities now, altering ones sex marker on important legal records like birth certificates, drivers licenses and other identity documents is allowed. As a result, crime statistics are being skewed, and violent crimes mostly committed by males are being falsely reported as though women are the perpetrators.
And that segues into the astounding corruption of my profession, journalism. Official guidelines from the Associated Press now urge reporters and editors to lie and use wrong sex pronouns in news coverage. The mainstream media is nearly 100% in the tank for this nonsense. Pronouns have always denoted the sex of the body. But today we’re told to prioritize the nebulous, materially meaningless concept of gender identity over and above everything else. I’m proud to say The Christian Post is not abiding by that.
Dr. Cretella did a fine job talking about the medical harms, and I have to say that the most devastating thing to see as a reporter has been the gender surgeries that are done on teenagers, at increasingly younger ages.
Indeed, there are no words to describe to what I felt when I stumbled upon the Instagram accounts of a young people who had undergone these procedures, like the woman in California who had a phalloplasty, a surgery where doctors strip skin and tissue from her forearm and leg in order to construct a fake penis. Because there was nothing wrong with her body the surgery didn’t fix anything, and she had to have dozens of follow-up surgeries to repair what was done. At one point in the process her nether regions were so badly mangled she had to have ileostomy bag and was forced to urinate through her anus.
Or there are the other Instagram accounts of young high school and college-age girls who show off their chest scars after the have had bilateral mastectomies. I’ve seen pictures where the nipples appear to be completely cut off. And some of the gender surgeons are brazen. I’ll never forget seeing a Canadian gender doctor advertising his services on social media while sporting a medical mask and a Santa Claus hat, holding up two medical waste buckets labeled “breast tissue.”
But if you haven’t been following the news on this subject, maybe you’ve seen Jazz Jennings on TLC. This is a young man who has been told he was a girl since he was very young. An image I wish I could unsee was his face contorted in excruciating pain after surgeons cut off his testicles, and inverted his penis to make a fake vagina using part of his bowels. But when they created that fake vagina there wasn’t much penile tissue to work with because, even as an 18-year-old, Jazz had the penis, developmentally speaking, of a 9-year-old due to all the puberty blockers he’d taken, which stunted his sexual development. Puberty blockers also take calcium out the bones that cannot be reintroduced later, and he very well may have serious skeletal issues or possibly osteoporosis by the time he reaches his 30s.
What they didn’t show you in the series is how after his genitals were amputated what he essentially had was a crotch-wound, and not long after the initial surgery was complete that crotch-wound split open, and had to be rushed back into the operating room.
Jazz continues to deal with severe mental health challenges and he recently went under the knife for the fourth time for another ‘corrective’ operation and viewers are watching his ongoing and prolonged suffering as his physical and mental torment is shown on camera. This is voyeuristic, cruel, and abuse of the highest order but it’s framed as entertainment.
I might also tell you about feminist anthropology professor Kathleen Lowrey from Alberta, Canada who was ousted from her associate department chair position earlier this year because she believes in the importance of biological sex, that a woman’s body actually means something profound in feminism. Her views were deemed “unsafe” by the powers-that-be on campus. It was in a phone interview with her where I learned about the case of Nina Louise Courtpatte, a 13-year-old girl who was brutally murdered in 2005 on an Edmonton-area golf course. The man who killed her, Michael Williams, raped, strangled, stabbed, and bludgeoned her to death with a hammer and then set her body on fire.
Williams was subsequently convicted and jailed. But unfortunately, Canada, claiming to be progressive, has recently updated it public policies — most famously Bill C-16 which added gender identity as protected grounds in its national human rights charter and in the criminal code — to accommodate the demands of LGBT activists. So now Williams, this psychopath, despite being a fully-intact male, identifies as female. He takes hormones sporadically enough so he can still can maintain an erection. You probably know what’s coming. He’s now housed in a women’s prison on the basis of his self-declared gender identity. I hope to high heaven the prison guards are keeping him away from the women inmates who are, in all likelihood, living every day in abject terror. And he is not the only sadistic criminal locked up with vulnerable women throughout the Western world.
And then there are the detransitioners, who are growing in number and are starting to make more noise despite a mass media blackout. These are men and women who once identified as transgender, who took these untested drugs, who underwent these drastic surgeries and have come to regret their transitions. As it turns out, these experimental measures did not improve their mental health issues like they were promised it would. And their bodies have been irreparably damaged.
I reviewed the medical documents and relevant court filings of one such male detransitioner and in February published an approximately 6000-word feature story wherein I recounted his harrowing ordeal. In 2011, this poor man was manipulated into an orchiectomy, the surgical removal of his testicles. He explained to me how gender clinicians never used sex-specific terms for the body during his appointments, always preferring genderist euphemisms instead. After years of wear and tear on his endocrine system from cross-sex hormone use, they persisted in pressuring him to consider surgery, telling him it wouldn’t affect how he looked, felt, or functioned. Because they wouldn’t relent he finally caved, and because of the transgender lingo they employed, he thought he was only getting a tiny piece of his testicles removed. Imagine his shock and dismay when he took the bandages off and he realized he’d been castrated.
This detransitioner told me: “I didn’t hate my genitals, but now they looked strange, weird. My scrotum looked like a deflated balloon, like the weird thing that hangs off a chicken’s neck. It’s lifeless, an empty sac.”
He knew something was really wrong about a year later when he started ejaculating blood. He now realizes that transgenderism is one humongous lie.
Along the way, I’ve met a few brave souls willing to push back against all this. And it’s mostly women who do so and they are bearing the brunt of transgender activists’ wrath. They are regularly threatened, doxxed, harassed, spit on, told to go die in a fire, get raped with cracked glass, sent violent pornography featuring demons sexually assaulting Jesus Christ, among other things. And the worst part? When they tell people about this vicious abuse, they aren’t believed.
But if you’d like to read about all of this you can check out my byline at The Christian Post. I’d also recommend the work of Madeleine Kearns at National Review, whose reporting on this topic is second-to-none. And you’re interested in tracing the money behind all of this, the best resource is, hands-down, Jennifer Bilek, who has published on a variety of platforms, and blogs at the 11th Hour blog. Her work is indispensable.
Yet today, I know that the goal of this summit is to give a voice to the victims and survivors of these toxic, top-down ideologies. So, in keeping with that aim, I’d like to focus the rest of my remarks on the mothers with whom I’ve conversed over the years. These are moms who have either lost or are losing their children, moms whose kids are being devoured by the bestial institutions in this most predatory gender industry.
But before I get to that I want say very quickly that if you are here today or are watching online and you’re a follower of Jesus, I submit that I don’t think we are going to be able to locate the necessary moral and spiritual resources to resist this scourge unless we’re able to exhibit compassion in its truest sense. The word compassion literally means “with suffering.” So as I read what I’m about to, please taste and feel this in the depths of your being and let it stir you. Don’t just let this be another speech you hear and forget about later.
The following are stories from mothers who have corresponded with me. I have removed or redacted names and identifying details in order to protect their anonymity as there are often legal repercussions if they are outed. Please know that I have vetted these accounts, and have official documents and pictures in some cases. These are their stories in their own words.
Mom No. 1
When your child is diagnosed with a disability, processing that information is much like passing through the stages of grief. It feels like your child has died, because the idea you held about who your child is does die.
When your child is diagnosed with a disability, processing that information is much like passing through the stages of grief. It feels like your child has died, because the idea you held about who your child is does die.
My daughter was diagnosed with high-functioning autism when she was seven, in second grade. The pieces of behaviors we’d labeled “quirky” now fell into place. When the psychologist gave us her diagnosis I realized that my daughter would never grow up to be who I’d imagined she might. She would probably never like to hug or be hugged. She would never be a popular kid, a charming girl, a social butterfly. She would never link arms with me and whisper a secret or confide in me about her inner thoughts and dreams.
I had to grieve those things, that imagined future young woman. The daughter that I thought I knew died that day. I had to start discovering who my daughter really is, and watch as she unfolded into the reality of who she would become. I learned to love her for who she is, rather than who I imagined she was.
Then, just a month shy of her thirteenth birthday, she announced to her father and me that she’s transgender—non-binary specifically, but leaning toward male.
Nothing could have shocked me more, because she’d never exhibited any desire to be other than a girl, and until just the previous few weeks she’d always presented as a girl: dresses, long hair, jewelry, and attempts to get me to let her wear makeup and high heels. This bizarre announcement was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. And she dug into it with both feet and both hands.
As the enormity of my daughter’s horrific decision sank into me, everything inside me screamed, “No! No! I already dealt with her death once, and now she’s trying to kill this girl I’ve come to know and love. She is my daughter, and she is part of me, and I can’t let her kill herself.”
I’d never suffered from anxiety, but during those first few weeks I learned what anxiety is. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I’d go to bed physically and emotionally drained, but the moment I dropped off to sleep my brain would hurl me back awake again, as if screaming, “This is an emergency! We’re under attack! You can’t sleep! Get up and do something! Save her!”
Terror and fatigue led to waking nightmares and the inability to concentrate or think clearly, which led to more insomnia, and worsening psychological and mental stability. The fight-or-flight instinct wouldn’t let me rest until this disaster had passed.
But this is a disaster that goes on for years. You’re living in a war zone now, and the bombs just keep screaming to the ground around you, exploding, day and night. Transgender activists teach your child to yell demonic obscenities at you, and to make up lies about things that never happened. They tell your child to threaten suicide or to cut herself to get her way.
One day, early on, my daughter lay in bed, covers over her head, refusing to go to school. She yelled, “I hate myself! I wish I were dead! I want to kill myself!”
I asked her, “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” No answer. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” I asked again. She just snuffled at me. “I’m going to ask you again, and if I don’t get an answer I’m going to understand that as a “yes” and I’m going to take you to the emergency room right now. Are you thinking seriously about hurting yourself?” She screamed, “No! Just go away and leave me alone!”
I’d called her out, and I’d “won”.
But if I knew then what I know now I never would’ve done what needed to be done that day, what I did, in calling her out. Today I know that if I’d taken her to the emergency room she’d almost certainly have been affirmed in her desire to transition. And if I didn’t agree to it they very well might have taken her away from me, as has been done to other parents who didn’t agree to let their children medically transition.
I’m scared to take her to doctors now.
After her announcement I began to research rapid-onset gender dysphoria, and what I learned sickened me. Teenage girls were having their healthy breasts amputated. They were being given puberty blockers that halt not only their endocrine systems but their brain development. Doctors were giving them massive doses of hormones like testosterone that caused them to grow beards and lose their feminine voices and curves.
The beautiful, brilliant, perfect daughter that my body conceived, incubated, and birthed! They wanted to physically mutilate her, and she wanted to let them do it.
I thank God every day that my daughter was only thirteen when this started, because we still had control over her life and choices. We pulled her out of public school, where the GSA club had recruited and indoctrinated her, and where teachers and staff used her trans name and pronouns behind our backs. We took away her Internet where social media influencers had preyed upon her naivete and adolescent fears. While we affirmed her pain and struggles as real and valid, we refused to agree with anything about the transgender narrative.
It’s been two years. The militancy she exhibited in the early weeks died off pretty quickly after we severed the transgender influences from her life. She’s coming back to herself now, slowly. I believe we’ll get her back again.
But I’m angry because of the years I’ve lost with her. I’m angry at the stilted, deformed way her maturation has been derailed by this hideous lie. And I’m terrified to send her or any of my children off to college, where transgender activism operates as the de facto law of the land.
I’ve never been so scared in my life.
Mom No. 2
I recall that night vividly. The phone call from our daughter telling us that our beloved son had declared himself transgender.
Our son is a cherished member of our family. He was a delight to raise and was doted on by his two older sisters. I remember how scared he was to be on his own, coupled with the excitement of so much responsibility he was going to find it an adjustment. But this night that turned into a literal nightmare for our family took place only a few months after he moved into his first apartment. I found out that after he moved in, a TRA needed a place to live (after her family couldn’t tolerate her) and moved in with our young adult son.
We were concerned that something was going on his life as he wouldn’t allow family in his apartment and he became extremely emotional anytime we tried to talk to him. Our loving son became secretive and antisocial. The first thing we did after our sons declaration that he was trans was contact the trans clinic in Vancouver to speak with the Doctor treating him. It turned out to be a woman who declares herself as Queer and actively participates in Campaigns to further trans rights.
We asked the Physician, who turns out is a General MD to speak with our family Physician and get our sons medical history. She refused, saying she knew our son better in a half hour visit than any of us could in a lifetime. She refused to request his medical history or request a psyche assessment. We explained to her that our sons declaration was sudden, he never had signs of gender confusion previously, but she did not care.
She put our son on cross-sex hormones on the very first visit and encouraged SRS surgery as soon as possible.
I was so distraught knowing that I could raise a person for 19 years, sacrifice my very own life for them and then be told that I know nothing, that I’m transphobic for not wanting my child to be chemically and surgically mutilated. Our family sought every avenue to help him, but we were blocked at every turn. TRA’S answered his phone, blocking us from all contact with him. At one point our son allowed his sisters and myself to visit him as long as the TRA who lives with him could be present at the apartment.
That night I believe I truly looked evil directly in the face. The TRA living with him was a young woman who declared herself as a man. She intercepted us every time we talked to our family member, getting angry and gnashing her teeth when we expressed concern. My sons room mate called the police on us and declared us trespassers, and had us removed from the building. My son throughout the entire ordeal said nothing just acquiesced to everything his roommate demanded. A room mate who paid no rent, just sponged off my child.
Everyday, it’s been five years, is shrouded in grief. Our son no longer associates with family. None of us are capable of living his lie or supporting his delusions. He was rushed into trans-ing by an aggressive TRA and further rushed into SRS surgery by an aggressive Physician. We lost an important part of our family, every celebration, every family dinner is marked by his absence. The trans movement is akin to a cult, you are required to abandon the people who love you most and break sacred bonds in order to adhere to a perverse ideology.
I remember curling up under a desk in a hotel room. I couldn’t allow my daughters or my husband to see my anguish. I booked a room for a couple of nights to process my feelings uninterrupted. I remember walking the streets after midnight, standing in front of a skytrain platform thinking stepping in front of a train would be less painful than what I was experiencing. I ground my teeth so badly while I was sleeping that I cracked every molar and needed prosthetics. My husband spent an entire year on sedatives because he was constantly tormented by nightmares. The first couple of years we were constantly attacked by TRA’S threatening to take our home, sue us for not accepting our son as a woman. They are parasites looking for a host.
Mom No. 3
My daughter, Emily, was just 14 years old when she decided that she was actually a boy. She was just 16 years old when a Pediatric Endocrinologist taught her to shoot up Testosterone (aka, anabolic steroids). I think most people are familiar with “roid rage.” At age 17, Emily’s testosterone level was over 20 times the normal level for a girl that age. Perhaps anabolic steroids helped fuel her decision to undergo a double mastectomy and radical hysterectomy, both done without my knowledge. The doctors who operated on her were aware that she had multiple mental health diagnoses. They were aware that she was in and out of homelessness after running away at 16 and living in extreme poverty. They simply did not care and why would they care when the United States government is funding cross-sex hormones and sterilization of mentally ill young people?
Like so many other gender-confused children, my daughter has been victimized by the very people who should have helped her: teachers, school counselors, therapists, social workers, doctors, courts, and lawmakers. Why was she allowed to change her name and gender in court, at age 17, without my knowledge? Like so many other gender-confused children, Emily came from a loving home. Like so many other gender-confused children, Emily is likely on the autism spectrum. Like so many other gender-confused children, Emily was not confused about gender identity until she got sucked into the Gay-Straight Alliance at school by a teacher. Like so many other gender-confused children, Emily was a happy, healthy, vibrant, strong, beautiful girl. Like so many other gender-confused children, Emily experienced some trauma and needed help. And like so many other parents, I am heartbroken, enraged, and living in a state of constant grief, with every memory of my daughter’s childhood now bittersweet.
Emily is 20 years old now. She’s still recovering from the radial forearm phalloplasty she had last year, followed by another associated surgery. Since I knew about the phalloplasty beforehand, I desperately tried to stop it. I contacted Emily’s surgeon, the head of the plastic surgery department, the head of the hospital, patient advocates, the state medical board, senators, the governor’s office, and numerous law firms. I flew to go see Emily twice in 6 weeks. When I realized I couldn’t stop the phalloplasty, I begged for doctors to skin my arm instead of hers. My efforts were futile. The day before her phalloplasty, I took her to Build-A-Bear, where she picked out a stuffed animal she would later use for comfort during her long recovery. The night before her surgery, I sobbed uncontrollably, alone in a motel room, nearly losing my mind, as I paced around the room hugging a pillow, pretending that it was her as a baby, while I sang, “You are my sunshine.” The next day, I waited helplessly during the 13-hour surgery with a rage so fierce, I contemplated what life in prison might be like.
Emily uses a wheelchair now, as she is in near-constant pain and on multiple medications, including testosterone. She has had seizures, panic attacks, and a host of “unexplained” illnesses. Her once porcelain complexion is blanketed with a thick beard and her soulful liquid brown eyes are now void of expression or emotion. She has few friends, is angry and unhappy most of the time, has problems obtaining and maintaining employment, and reports often feeling suicidal and not knowing why. She lives alone in a small house, thanks to a temporary government grant. The LGBTQ organizations that were so eager to help her on the path to destruction are now nowhere to be found.
No child should be put in a position to make life-altering decisions that will impact the rest of their lives. No government should ever allow, much less fund, the sterilization of mentally ill children. No teacher or therapist should affirm a child’s false self-identity. No doctor should ever amputate healthy organs from children. If a sadistic rapist kidnapped my daughter and did to her what doctors have done to her, the horrific details would be headline news and there would be a public cry for justice. Yet a group of adults conspired to drug my daughter, cut off her breasts, cut out her entire reproductive system, and skin her arm and leg to create a fake penis and society celebrates. Does it matter if that group of sadists who sliced up my daughter have the letters M.D. scribbled after their names?
I think about these mothers every. single. day. Their exhausted, anguished countenances are seared in my memory. Their gut-wrenching, heaving cries of agony will forever stay with me.
For all of you listening, my question for you is this: How many is too many? How many children and young adults have to be sterilized, maimed, and mutilated before you’ll rise up and say that’s enough?
Maybe you’re thinking, this is so overwhelming, what can we do? I’m not going to tell you what to do specifically, but I do implore you, seek God’s face. Ask Him what you’re supposed to do and then do whatever He tells you. But please speak up in some way and show some courage because as you do it will inspire courage in others. You’ll find that a lot of people agree with you.
And if there is a silver lining to any of these horrors that I’ve just described, it is that I now semi-regularly correspond with people who do not share my faith or my views on many things but they are now reading The Christian Post because they know that we do not and will not kowtow to the notion that some penises can be female.
I hear from infuriated feminists who are angry about how this ideology destroys women’s hard-won sex-based rights, I hear from horrified bewildered lesbians and gay men who are outraged at how same-sex attracted youth are being pushed toward gender-transition, and I’ve heard from a few atheists who are appalled at how basic science is being denied and overwritten in favor of this irrationality. And you know what they all tell me? “Please don’t stop reporting, Brandon. Please keep going.”
And speaking of courage, there’s a woman in particular who has become a friend of mine who has lot of it. Her name is Miriam Ben-Shalom. To say we have some profound worldview differences is putting it mildly. I’m a philosophically conservative-leaning, small-o orthodox Christian who’s very much a believer in our faith’s historic teaching on marriage and sexual ethics. She’s a politically left-leaning Jewish radical feminist lesbian. And she’s taken a lot of guff for associating herself with someone like me. But I have such immense respect and admiration for her.
Despite her iconic status within the gay rights world due to how she was instrumental in the ending of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a few years ago she was disallowed from being the grand marshal for the Milwaukee pride parade because of some comments on her social media page that was critical of transgenderism. Ever since she’s been a brave and outspoken advocate for women and girls but for everyone really against transgender activism in all its forms. And
I asked her if she could share what she would say to a group of mostly Catholic, Christian, ecumenical religious crowd, about this particular fight. She graciously supplied the following, and I’m honored to read it now on her behalf. This is from Miriam:
Miriam Ben-Shalom:
I am a Jew. I am a Lesbian. I am a woman.
I turn and turn, look around me. I see bodies mutilated. Breasts cut off. Testicles and penises removed. I hear the guffaws of Big Pharma and Big Medicine, but what I see are the sons of Joseph Mengele. I see the experiments in Auschwitz, harvested tissue samples, the cutting of children’s bodies to try and replicate twins, the sewing together of children’s bodies, experiments in changing eye color, experiments with noma, a type of gangrene.
Silence is no option for me: I have 6 million people looking at me who say, “We had no voice and the world was silent—will you also be silent?” Jews call what happened in WWII ‘shoah’: which means annihilation. What I fight for—and what you must fight against is shoah: the annihilation of our future, the annihilation of a generation and more castrated, and the erasure of a class of humans known as ‘women.’ The institution known as the family is being shattered. Science and fact have become meaningless and the truth twisted beyond means. Transgenderism is as vicious a contagion as Covid-19, as vicious as any tyrant. I, a Jew and a woman am too familiar with this sort of thing. That is not hyperbole.
I look at so-called ‘sex-change’ operations where body parts are removed, artificial body parts installed. Children poisoned with chemicals. All in an effort to create something that simply cannot exist, just as Mengele tried to create Aryans. Shall I try to tell you how, in my rage, I shake my fist at a god and cry for these poor souls who have been tricked into thinking they were somehow “born wrong”? Shall I tell you how all I can do is hold and rock a woman detransitioner as she cries for the loss of body and self, and say to her, “Welcome home, sister. I was waiting for you. Glad it took no longer. You are not lost. Welcome home.” Shall I try to tell you of the grief I feel for these young lives carved, lost, gone? I, a Jew and a lesbian, am too familiar with this sort of thing. That is not hyperbole.
I see 10-year-old boys in drag prancing around on a stage with near-naked men while others throw dollars at the child. I see children being told they are — yes!—born in the wrong body because they like toys and colors most think of as being sex-assigned. I see 12, 13, 14-year-old children being told they can start puberty blockers. I see schools telling children they can lie to their parents and “be transgender” at school. I see male ‘teachers’ tout their ‘sex change’ at school and fight to use girls’ bathrooms. I see young Lesbians being told they are really men and being subjected to intense pressure to transition. I see sex manuals for young children—what 8-year-old thinks about masturbation? Think transgenderism is not interested in hijacking children? Think this is not abuse, grooming, or pedophilic? Think again. This is not hyperbole.
Were I here with you Lake Charles today I would reach out my hand and ask you to fight with me. We have so much more in common than we have in difference. This is not about Jew or Christian, Lesbian or heterosexual. This is about existence. This is about stopping modern-day Josef Mengele’s, stopping the perversion of unfettered decadence. This is not hyperbole.
In the name of all you value and keep holy, take my hand and let us work together to stop this social contagion. Time for us to focus on what is at hand and to set aside differences. Time for all of us to fight for our children and our children’s children. Time for us to rip Joseph Mengele out from our society and humanity. This is not hyperbole.
And all I have to say to that is, my hand is out to you too, Miriam.
Thank you all so much.