Transcript: The Dangerous Overreach of SB107

Conversations in Year Zero

Erin Friday: “I don't think there was an underlying problem. There became one, however, because what the internet crowd tells these kids —and this is why I had that problem with the word ‘support’ —is that your parents don't support you if they don't support your gender identity. So she had the internet crowd telling her that her parents don't love her, that we're bigots, and that we're horrible people.

And that, I think, was the cause of what then turned out to be depression and anxiety. You can't tell a 13-year-old little girl that the people who have always been in her life, and loved her, and provided for her, don't love her. And that's what the teachers were indicating. Because I was unsafe, right? And that's what the online social media groups, or her social groups were telling her, that I am bad. I mean, they even so much as encouraged her —and this is why SB107 is so bad—they encouraged her to run away. They encouraged her to emancipate.”

What follows below is the transcript of a recent conversation I had with Lisa Selin Davis, Erin Friday and Ernie Trakas on my weekly interactive show Conversations in Year Zero, conducted on the Callin app, about a bill that will turn California into a sanctuary state for kids seeking transgender healthcare.

Friday is a Northern CA-based attorney who testified about the dangers of SB107 before the legislature. She is also the mother of a daughter who underwent Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, declaring herself to be a boy in the ninth-grade under the influence of the ongoing Internet-driven peer-to-peer social contagion that the teaching of gender ideology in schools is in the process of dramatically scaling up. She talks about her experiences here in unusually personal and emotional terms. Anyone seeking witness of the effects of gender ideology as they manifest in the real world should listen.

The original episode aired on July 29, 2022. You can find it and other episodes of Conversations in Year Zero on Callin, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify.

Become a paid subscriber to my Substack to receive transcripts of all audio content across platforms.

Wesley Yang: Welcome to the latest edition of Conversations in Year Zero, the talk radio show that I host every week, alongside the Substack that I maintain as a written venue, I also have a podcast over there, as well. 

Today we're going to be talking about one of the last posts that was published [on my Substack]; and we have the author here today, Lisa Selin Davis, who wrote a piece entitled, “The Dangerous Overreach of California’s SB107” which concerns a law introduced by Democratic Party legislator in California that would turn California into a sanctuary state for “trans kids” and put that term in scare quotes, seeking “gender-affirming care,” also put that in quotes, in the state of California inviting them to descend on California from other states where they may have difficulty obtaining it because of the law or because of their parental will. And it's a truly amazing piece of legislation for reasons that the other two speakers here made clear in testimony that they offered to the legislature in opposition to its passage. And I'm just going to begin by having Lisa explain what the law is, what it does, and then maybe we can move on to Erin or Ernie who can explain what is extraordinary about it, what kind of constitutional problems that it will have, we can go over some of the specific scenarios that it could enable scenarios that I think most people, and most parents in particular, would regard as rather extreme and frightening. And then we can get an update on the status of the bill from Erin. So but let's uh, let's first begin with Lisa just kind of explaining, going over the basic points that she put into the article and telling us what SB 107 is, what it is, why it was brought, why it has been introduced, and what it enables. 

Lisa Selin Davis: Okay, my assumption, I could be wrong, but my assumption is that this bill is first and foremost a reaction. I think the Democrats and the Republicans are fighting this legislative battle over trans kids. Probably like, neither side is truly considering what the needs of you know, actual kids with gender dysphoria are; although I think the Republicans are closer to actually considering the science of what we're calling gender-affirming care. So I believe the idea of the bill is, hey, has your home state – you know, Arkansas or Idaho– banned gender-affirming care? Or, rather, legislated that you cannot have, what we used to call a sex change, until you're an adult, [then] you can come to California. I think that's the impetus for it, is to counter what red states are doing. 

But there's a lot more going on, besides some states trying to prevent children under 18 from having gender-affirming or gender reassignment medical interventions. There are also multiple custody battles going on, where one parent wants to medicate and another doesn't. And for the most part, the parent who doesn't tend to lose custody of their child, although there have been reports of the affirming parent also losing custody. 

So I think this bill is responding to a number of things happening in our courts, and in our culture, and in our legislatures; and is saying, you know – is there a custody dispute? Take your child to California. You can get your child the gender care they want or need here. And is it banned in your home state? Is it criminalized in your home state – like Idaho– you can take your child here.’ And the way it's written, and I think Ernie and Erin should go into the details because I interviewed them to understand it better, the way it's written is that it kind of overrides these laws in other states about things like custody. And many of these laws and school guidelines also override parental rights, which are constitutionally bestowed upon us, that we, you know, a school doesn't get to decide our child's medical or mental health interventions, we do. And so there are all kinds of ways that the bill is written that it overrides our constitutional rights, and the kind of agreement that states have to not interfere with each other's laws. And like I said, I think Erin and Ernie could go into the real nitty-gritty of that. 

Several people I talked to said they've never seen a bill quite like this, and I think part of the issue is it's kind of this combination of difficult to discern legalese, vague language, mixed with the kind of Judith Butler-y gender jargon. So that, you know, we're all kind of caught off guard and don't really know what we're talking about. So I think for proponents of gender-affirming care, and the idea that trans kids need to have, to medically gender transition, this seems like, ‘Oh, these mean states banned it, you can come to California.’ And they're processing it as a good thing. But I think, as I quoted Ernie saying in the piece, I think it is inviting a kind of legislative civil war that could go on forever. And I think at the end we can talk about why is this happening here, when just yesterday, the Tavistock gender clinic in the UK shut down, so that they could move to a regional patient-centered care that was really, really focused on psychological interventions, and moving away from the affirming, informed consent model. Why are we battling this out this way, in the courts, when all of these other countries are making decisions about what to do based on evidence? We're doing something very different here, and to me it seems like we're doing something – each time a congress person introduces a bill, it's just another battle, and it doesn't seem like it's getting us anywhere closer to figuring out how to handle the epidemic of gender dysphoria among young people. 

Do Erin and Ernie want to kind of go into the details about how it nullifies custody agreements, and you know, the Full Faith and Credit clause? Do you want to go into the nitty-gritty of how the bill violates the Constitution?

Erin Friday: Sure, why don't I start and I'll then punt over to Ernie on the Full Faith and Credit and talk about the effects on child custody. If that's okay with you, Ernie; and feel free to comment on my comments. 

But you know, I think it's really important to understand why Senator Wiener put forth this bill. And Lisa, I agree with you, in part, that part of his reason was to retaliate against other states that are banning gender  interventions on minors, but that's not the whole story. And it's clear from the language that that's not the whole story. He went way beyond that. And it is possible to write a cogent bill that would have just related to those states that are barring gender interventions for minors. But he went well beyond that. This bill affects all 50 states, every parent and every child. 

So, I’d like to start out with a quote of what Scott Wiener said that he is making this bill for, and he says, and I quote, “We won’t let trans kids be belittled, used as political pawns, separated from their families, or denied gender-affirming care. We won’t let their parents be criminalized or have their kids taken away.” 

That is the exact thing that he is doing with SB 107. He is, this legislation proposes taking a child away from the custodial parent in every other state, if that custodial parents will not agree to what are sterilizing-causing treatments, and experimental treatments, and like you said, treatments that are now being, you know, that are banned or are extremely curtailed in Sweden, Finland, France, and yesterday, the Tavistock being shut down. We're moving in the complete opposite direction, with lightning speed, with no science supporting it. 

And the scariest part of this bill is, is that parents who are divorced, and one parent – let's just suppose dad has no custody of child, zero, for valid reasons, and Mom has full custody -- Dad can take that child abscond to California, subject that child to sterilizing treatment, and he has full safety here in California. He is untouchable. That mother, who had custody of that child, by a court of law or by written agreement, now has to come to California to try to get custody back of her child, which is going to be nearly impossible by this bill. I would say it is impossible. And so what Senator Wiener says he doesn't want to do is exactly what he's doing. He's criminalizing and taking away the child from the custodial parent in every other state. 

And I have to admit, this bill, I spent probably 50 hours reading it backwards, forwards. I'm sure Ernie did, too. I sent it to other attorneys. I sent it to family law attorneys. I was so blown away with what was contained in this bill that I couldn't believe my own interpretation. I had to get second and third opinions on this. Because this is a total affront to parents rights. Not only that this bill will protect the Dad  –let's say that let's say the dad's a bad actor, that's why he didn't get custody of his child – California law enforcement will not assist that mother in getting her child back. Imagine that. Imagine too, a parent having to come to California soil to fight for custody of her child. The cost involved is prohibitive here. 

Plus, no one would want to fight for custody of their child with a gender issue in California. Because we know, in California, we know of many cases where parents have lost custody of their child because they refuse to affirm. Parents have lost, have had their kids go into foster care, because they've refused to affirm in the state of California. So I, as a parent in another state, would be terrified of this law, absolutely terrified. It violates parental rights every which way. And the backlash from this law. I mean, I don't care what side you're on, you're a Democrat or Republican –personally, I'm a registered Democrat for 30 years– I'm embarrassed of our party right now. I don't know what they're thinking. I don't know what they're doing. They used to be the party of science and now they're ignoring it. 

And parents aren't having it anymore. We're mutinying. San Francisco School Board was ousted. Boudin was recalled. And  I just want to talk about the author of this bill, too. Senator Wiener doesn't have children. That's a really important factor to remember. He doesn't have children. This senator has put forth legislation that puts male-bodied men into women's prisons. He has passed SB 145, which gives courts discretion to put an adult, who was within 10 years of the child, whether they have to be on the sex registry. So imagine a 14-year-old who has consensual sex, which is a misnomer. How does a 14-year-old have consensual sex with a 24-year-old? That 24-year-old may not have to go on the sex registry. And this is Senator Wiener. This is the person who is putting forth this legislation. So we need to kind of look at it in light of who is pushing this. Does he care about children? Is that really his push on this? I think not. So with that, Ernie, do you want to talk about the Full Faith and Credit the issue, or do you want to chime in on anything that I had to say?

Wesley Yang: Can somebody talk about under what circumstances the court is able to take temporary custody and what that actually means? Like can a child travel there alone, put themselves under the custody of the court, and end up in a foster home while they're getting…. like you can run away from Idaho, find yourself under the temporary custody of the court, given the hormones that you're seeking, and be placed into a foster home by the California system?

Erin Friday: That is absolutely correct, Wesley. Yes. Because the way the language is written in this code, is that as long as the child –not the child and parents, not the child and custodial parent or non-custodial parent, just the child –once the child gets onto California soil, California must, the courts must, they don't have any latitude, they must take temporary jurisdiction over that child. Now, just because the child ran away, that is a black mark against the custodial parents to control the child. So can those parents lose custody of that child? Absolutely. Especially because–

Wesley Yang: So they'll still have due process, but there'll be facing judges and a legal regime that is going to take their opposition to the thing that caused the child to to run away, which is their opposition to gender-affirming care, as…you know, they're going to treat that as a criterion that would weigh in the direction of the loss of their custody.

Erin Friday: Yes, absolutely. And we've seen that. We've seen that in cases in California, where the one parent refuses to subject the child to experimental gender interventions, and the other parent wants to affirm. Well, the affirming parent gets custody of that child. And we've even seen in the case of Abigail Martinez, she lost custody of her child, not in a custody battle, but as an alleged abuser because she refused to call her daughter by a male name. So it was a name and a pronoun. And let's make clear that this law doesn't just affect gender interventions as Lisa explained them - hormones, surgeries– it also relates to mental health. So what would that be? That would be social transition. So a parent conceivably, like Abigail Martinez, an out-of-state parent could conceivably close custody of their children over a name and a pronoun once that child gets to California. Because those parents may be seen as abusive for not, you know, ascribing to the child's desired name and social transition plan. It's a horrifying law, it's a terrifying law.

Wesley Yang: Do you think they understand the full implications of what they passed? Or, or maybe not? 

Erin Friday: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the reason I say that is because they change the language through each one of these codes, and that's what makes this law so confusing. Because they keep changing the words. So in some portions of the code, the parent needs to be a part of it,

 and other parts, it's a person. And so I don't want to go into the legalese of it. But I think it's designed to be confusing, and it's designed to have this desired effect. Because here in California, we have this horrible law that if a child goes into foster care, and the child is 12-years-old or older, they get to dictate their gender interventions. 12-years-old. So if that child can get into foster care, the world is their oyster, they get to make all these decisions on their own. Why don't we have that law? So the encouraged…sorry. Dids are encouraged to run away.

Wesley Yang: So is a 12-year-old who lives with their parents and is not in foster care, does that child have the discretion to get puberty blockers on their own say so, or do they need parental consent?

Erin Friday: They need parental consent.

Wesley Yang: But there's something about, like, AB 1184, do you know what I’m referring to? So, how does that change, the uh, so this is a law that makes it so that a minor can get an abortion without parental consent, but but it also refers to puberty blockers, is that right? And the insurance, the insurance, your parent's insurance, the insurance has to pay for it without telling the people who are paying for the policy what they're covering. Am I right about this?

Erin Friday: Yeah, yeah. So again, this bill is really confusing, too, which again, I think is by design. AB 1184 talks about “sensitive services,” and part of sensitive services includes abortion, and now gender interventions. And what it says is that insurance carriers are not to reveal to the insured parents, read parents, there - the one who's paying for it - that their child has gotten any of these interventions. So it's to keep secrets from parents while getting the parents to actually pay for it. 

So it's, you know, I fought on this bill, too, saying that, you know, you would be making me part of the person actually transitioning my child against my own will, by me paying for her insurance. But, you know, there's…can minors use that to get gender-affirming care? I don't think so. The law is unclear. But there is a statute in California that requires that parents consent to interventions that cause sterility. Now, we know that puberty blockers can cause sterility. This is actually stated by UCSF’s Maddie Deutsch and who is the current USPATH (United States Professional Association for Transgender Health) president. And it's also on, you know, in her papers. Obviously, hormones can result in sterility. So I think the way that law’s interpreted currently is that only kids that are 18-and-over, would be able to get these interventions and have their parents’ insurance policies pay for it, unbeknownst to the parents.

Wesley Yang: So they're 18, they're still on their parents’ insurance, they can choose whatever they want, it will be paid for. If you are in the foster care system, you are judged to be competent at the age of 12 to choose interventions that could result in your sterility. On the other hand, if you do have a parent and you're under the age of 18, not just in California, but anywhere in the country, you can run away to California, put yourself under the temporary custody of the court. And now in order for you to get what you're seeking, you still have to go to a doctor, and the doctor goes through the normal process; but is the law in California such that affirm-only care is already the law based on other pronouncements of the legislature?

Erin Friday: Sure is. Sure is. I mean, it's only affirming care in California, and affirming care, that term, doesn't even require that there be a finding of gender dysphoria. It’s cafeteria-like desires here. So it's autonomy, self autonomy, and it's what the patient believes that the patient wants. And of course, California has anti-conversion therapy laws, too, which can be interpreted to preclude anyone from exploring whether hormones—

Wesley Yang: –so what Biden has proposed through executive order to impose on the federal government exists in California –you cannot operate as a psychotherapist, who deals with gender dysphoric youth, who engages in a process of exploration of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, other comorbidities along with gender dysphoria – if the patient says, “no, in fact, my gender identity is the opposite of the one that I have.” Under those circumstances, one may only proceed with gender affirmative care, is that a correct characterization of the legal regime on this issue in California?

Erin Friday: I don't think it's as cut and dry as that, and Ernie, you can jump in here. I think that is how it's been interpreted, but the way the law is written, therapists and psychiatrists can look at the comorbid mental health issues and treat those. Now they can't treat those with the eye towards changing the person's gender. But as a lead of a parent group in northern California, we know that once you treat the underlying mental health issue, whether it be an eating disorder, OCD, anxiety, depression, that many times the gender dysphoria disappears along with it.

Wesley Yang: So if that happens, are you guilty of conversion therapy, under this law?

Erin Friday: Well, who's going to file that suit against that provider? Certainly not the parents, and certainly not the child who no longer feels dysphoric. But yeah, potentially, potentially. I mean, these laws are all designed to give a one-treatment-only option for anyone, for whatever reason, they decide that they are not the gender that matches their sex body. And that's a huge problem. I mean, some of these kids have had sexual assault, and maybe that's why they're deciding that their opposite gender.

Lisa Selin Davis: Well, I think also, one of the things we're dealing with is that everybody has mastered these, kind of, Karl Rove-style linguistic trickery. So one side will say, gender exploratory therapy, which would be basically traditional psychotherapy with an eye toward understanding the source of gender dysphoria, they'll say that that is code for conversion therapy. And meanwhile other people are saying banning conversion therapy is actually banning exploratory therapy. And each side is constantly accusing the other of euphemistic language that masks malintent. 

And it's really difficult, it's often just difficult to get a handle on what's being suggested. And I want to go back to, you know, the kind of overlap with abortion and the use of the language of bodily autonomy because I do think many people on the left believe: a) that a child knows themselves, that a trans kid will emerge naturally and organically and that's a stable identity, and that the appropriate response to it is medical intervention with cross sex hormones or surgeries or social transition. And the problem with taking that stance is that it's really in defiance of research. And we don't have very good research, and we don't have a ton of research. But the important thing, I think the one thing to think about in terms of this bill that says a child can go to California without parents or in violation of custody agreements, is that the only even slightly longitudinal research, and it's not great research, but the kind of original Dutch studies of kids who they determined had fared well after medical intervention. These are studies of kids in supportive and stable families. So somehow, the left has gotten this idea that any kid who identifies as trans will benefit from these medical interventions. And that's simply not what the research says. We do not have research on kids who are in really, really perilous situations at odds with their families. You know, we have some research that shows that supportive families, that it's important for LGBT kids to have parental acceptance, and then that contributes to mental well being. 

But even the woman who conducted that research, who would probably accept a lot of the far left arguments, her intention was never to separate kids from families that didn't want to socially or medically transition. The idea was always to try to get families to stay connected. 

So there's a fundamental misinterpretation of research and taking these ideas, and just running in the wrong direction with them. That is like, just because you have gender dysphoria, or claim the label of trans does not mean that your whole family has to be dissolved, or that you should be separated from them in order to medicate. And that is...I've seen again and again, as I've studied this issue, the impetus toward family abolition, and that parents are the problem, and transition, with or without them, is the solution. And I think it's really important to push back on that with the available evidence we have.

Erin Friday: Lisa, you bring up good points, you know, again, with the kind of language issues. The way the left looks at support is in a silo. The only support, the only proper parent support, is to support the gender identity. And that's just wrong. And the evidence doesn't support that. And my own evidence doesn't support that. 

Last night, we had another child in my parent group who desisted, after three years. Did the parents support her? Yes, they loved her and they supported her. Did they ever accept the trans identity? They did not. Support doesn't mean acquiescence to a gender identity. Support means love, compassion, caretaking. And it's really important for that word to be dismantled and presented in that manner.

Wesley Yang: So I made a reference to the term ROGD, which refers to Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria. And there was a paper that put this term into circulation. It became notorious because it was instantly pulled from the journal where it was published, it was a look at the phenomenon that seems to be emerging of clusters of friends, all of whom females usually, you know, in their early teens, transitioning together all at once. 

I've talked to people on Twitter who have referred to ‘mahjong club,’ a group of people, one of the five - all five of them have daughters, and only one of their daughters identifies as a girl. So this is the social contagion thesis, that, of course, was seen as being very hostile to the trans activist agenda; and that was successfully deplatformed, therefore, you don't have a lot of research about the extent of the issue. But it isn't hard to find parents who can talk about this happening at their schools - about 30% of the eighth grade girls identifying as some version of trans - I would assume a smaller percentage of them, putting themselves on a pathway to actual physical interventions-  but nonetheless, persisting in, you know, a certain kind of identification and pouring their formative years into a – what I think it doesn't take too much awareness of what happens on Reddit and Tik Tok and other places, of you know, a kind of cult-like obsession, not so different than other fads that we've seen in teenage life of the adoption of oppositional identities, but one that carries a risk that goes beyond pregnancies, or even a tattoo, or other things that are objectionable, but that actually, you know, could culminate in making lifelong decisions that will be regretted fairly soon. 

So something I tweeted not so long ago is that kids used to, you know, not understand the actual long term implications of their actions, and end up pregnant as a result. And now today, we have kids who don't understand the long term consequences of their actions, and end up sterile. And, of course, the scale of the latter problem does not come close to the scale of the former problem, even today, when the age at which young people are having sex for the first time, is much older than it was when I was a young person. 

Nonetheless, you know, the latter is this new, bizarre, threatening phenomenon that also happens to be fed not just by a peer-to-peer internet contagion, but now increasingly educators and schools and the federal government, and the, you know, the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Affairs, and the President of the United States– all of them engaging in this word game of referring to taking lifelong interventions that could result in one's infertility for life, as quote unquote, “life-saving, gender affirmative care,” which did not even exist at any scale just a few years ago, but the denial of which today is a, you know, dangerous right-wing reactionary plot to attack the human and civil rights of America's young people. 

And that is the emotional verbal blackmail and incompetence, incontinence that we've all been subjected to, on the basis of this being turned into a partisan issue. And, you know, there is this contest that has now resulted in California - richest state in the country, I don't know if it's the most populous, I guess it is– exercising this incredible legislative power to have an effect on every child and every parent in America. So there's a kind of constitutional adventurism here, that I don't know if Ernie can talk about it. And also, before we go any further, Erin, you said that you had an update on its status. 

And something that wasn't included in the piece was, you know, this is something that has been introduced by Wiener, in a democratic supermajority legislature. Can we assume just as a matter of default that it's going to pass? Or, or are there some obstacles to its passage?

Erin Friday: Let me answer your last question, and then I'll let Ernie – I'm sorry, Ernie -- I'll let Ernie pop in. Well, did the Democrat –did democracy work with this bill, at all? I'd say not. So, a little history of this bill, this bill started out as a CalFresh bill. It was about SNAP, which is providing funds for people in poverty, for food. And it passed through the Senate unanimously. And then Scott Wiener did what is called the gut-and-amend, and he redlined the entire bill and he changed it to be about gender. So it bypassed the Senate, and it will not go back to the Senate for the Senate's bill. This is very slick. And it obviously shuts down debate on this bill, robust debate. Right. So now this bill is in appropriations. And this morning, I found out that it's now in suspense. And that means that it's in a holding pattern. So it can either die, which is what we're hoping, or it can be moved to the consent calendar, which means the assembly will just vote on it without any more dialogue. Which is, again, just you, from a….

Wesley Yang: Is its victory assured in the assembly?

Erin Friday: Oh, yeah, for sure. Because no Democrat has had the backbone to vote against this. So it's definitely on party lines. My colleague and I have been meeting, for the last couple of weeks, with everyone in the appropriations –where it is now– in their committee; and you know, we're not getting anywhere with any of the Democrats. Which again, is sad to me. It's sad to me, as a registered Democrat. But yeah, it's going to pass and it will end up - if it gets to the floor, it will pass in the assembly, and it will never go back to the Senate. And that's how our democracy works in California, apparently.

Wesley Yang: So are there people in the committee who may see it as politically pragmatic, not to put it to the assembly floor? Or is there some hope or possibility of that? Or is it gonna go to the assembly?

Erin Friday: I don't know the answer to that. We have asked, they're not going to tell us directly. I'm hoping that with the new information that we sent them with the Tavistock and with the pointed questions, you know, there's been quite a few people who have been opposing this on legal issues, you know –this law is unconstitutional, but does the legislature care? No, maybe. Maybe they'll let the courts decide. So I don't know. I don't have a lot of confidence given the fact that we have gone to Sacramento, we have testified the last testimony, Chloe Cole, a very bold and brave 17-year-old detransitioner, who had a double mastectomy at the age of 15. She testified and not one of the lawmakers asked her questions. And if she can't sway them at all, I don't know who can sway them.

Wesley Yang: So, Ernie, do you want to talk about the constitutional issues?

Ernie Trakas: Sure. I'm happy to weigh in. You know, to follow up on what the ladies have talked about I’ll start with Article IV and the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution. Simply put, that just means that no state can pass a law that abrogates, for lack of a better word, the laws of another state. And that's exactly what 107 will do if it's passed. 

So for instance, if a parent or parents in Iowa, have a court order enjoining any gender-affirming care with respect to their child, that child could go to California with a relative or along thereof. And if Bill 107 were to pass, California courts would not have to honor an Iowa decision. So that's a clear question as to whether or not that violates Article IV, right there. 

And so on that basis alone, I'm anticipating that we're going to see states attorneys general filing federal court actions for that reason. And then, in addition to that, you've got almost to the day, 100 years of Supreme Court precedent, establishing the supremacy of parental rights, that 107 will clearly violate the protections offered by the 1st and 14th Amendments of the US Constitution, and as confirmed and reaffirmed by the Supreme Court beginning in 1923 in Meyers v.Nebraska, up to and including more recent decisions, including the Dobbs decision, which again, doesn't deal with this particular issue precisely. But Judge Alito’s decision does reinforce the idea of long held values in this country, ie here parental rights. And so I'm confident that challenges to this law on the basis of Article IV and or violation of parental rights as long as established by Supreme Court decision and protected by the 1stand 14th Amendments of the Constitution will prevail. It's just, as we all know, that type of litigation takes years. And what happens in the interim to the young child or young person who proceeds with gender-altering surgery that is not reversible? So I mean, it's a serious… [AUDIO CUT OUT].

Wesley Yang: You cut out there for a moment. I had another question about the requirement not to participate in or to respond to any subpoenas. So this means also that gender clinicians would, in practice, would not be, you know, who did work on kids who fled there, or who were taken there - they would have impunity. The California Court has told them to interfere with the judicial processes of other, has told all of its insurers to interfere with the judicial processes of other states. Is that right? And that doesn't sound very constitutional to me either.

Erin Friday: Ernie, are you back? Do you want to take this, or do you want me to?

Ernie Trakas: Can you guys hear me now? Yeah. Okay. I agree 100%. That's exactly what I was talking about, in terms of violating the Full Faith and Credit Clause in our article. And so, you know, this will lead to a tidal wave, or as I put it with Lisa, I think, a civil litigation war. Meaning that civil lawsuits will be filed in likely every federal court in the country over issues just like this. 

But again, we're dealing with an activist agenda here that doesn't care about the constitutionality or the legality of the law that they're going to pass. They're going to pass it, if it does pass, with impunity, and take the chances that they'll prevail where they can. And, you know, it's not difficult to imagine the scenario where parents can't afford litigation. And unfortunately, on the parents’ side of this issue, you don't have many attorneys that are willing to undertake it, even on an expectation that they may get fees awarded by the court, which, you know, there are mechanisms for that to happen. And there's precious few that are willing to take the time or have the expertise to do it.

Wesley Yang: So they know that it's unconstitutional?

Ernie Trakas: I don't see how they couldn't.

Erin Friday: They actually put it in their analysis.

Wesley Yang: Yeah, they all but boasted about it, or they do boast about it. And so they're just going to get as many years of running room as they can out of this because they know that a court will, at some point, with a certainty strike it down. But the performative gesture in the moment and for however long it lasts, is of sufficient value to them. They are just going to do this costly, fruitless, boondoggle that they know from day one will not survive. Is that correct?

Ernie Trakas: That's how I see it anyway, I don't know how you can come to any other conclusion.

Erin Friday: Yeah, and like I said, I think they're moving at a, California is moving at a faster clip to push more of these gender-affirming laws through because they see the writing on the wall. They see what's happening in Europe. They know that this is gonna get shut down. This is a money-making machine. I mean, we have to look at the whys of this. This is a huge, this is multi-billion dollar industry.

Ernie Trakas: And at the same time, without any real liability on the part of the medical providers who undertake the strict gender transition, whether it's hormonal therapy or surgery. I mean, because using the WPATH standard of care, all you have to have is the child statement that, yeah, I've had this issue for a long time. And unlike any other type of medical procedure, where you have to have some sort of diagnostic evidence, in most instances here they're able to circumvent it by using that standard of care, which really isn't a standard of care, it's nothing more than a guideline.

Erin Friday: And that brings up - because it's all consent-based. So it's consent. So medical providers have a free pass, and then the inability to effectuate any subpoenas, gives them even more of a pass for medical malpractice. Because the out-of-state parent will never know what happened to their child. Because no subpoena needs to be responded to. So they could be doing anything to that child. 

So does this benefit children? I don't see one benefit to a child.

Ernie Trakas: I agree. It does benefit an agenda, though.

Erin Friday: That it does. 

Wesley Yang: So Erin, we're gonna move on to, you know, I mentioned what ROGD is, and you know, this just happened to your child; is this how you became aware of the issue? And can you tell us what happened?

Erin Friday: Sure, yeah. This, I had no idea what was going on. I thought of myself as a well-informed, intelligent person. But of course, I was working full time, and I'm in northern California, so the only information that I ever read, you know, from the left papers, New York Times and like, never talked about any of the harms to children, or social contagion, or any of the stuff that we just talked about today. 

So when my daughter, over COVID, made her pronouncement that she was trans. And this was sort of on the heels of her comprehensive sex education at a public school that spent, you know, an entire hour teaching them about gender identity. Again, unbeknownst to me. So yeah, she came—

Wesley Yang: Was she going to physical school at the time?

Erin Friday: Well, when she got the sex-ed curriculum, she was going to physical school. And like the social contagion that you just talked about, all of her friends, and I mean 100% of them, came to my house after the sex-ed curriculum, and they were all something on the alphabet. Not one of them was straight.

Wesley Yang: How old were they at the time?

Erin Friday: 11 and 12. Yeah, seventh grade. 

Wesley Yang: So this was right after they got the class explaining to them what gender ID was. 

Erin Friday: Correct. That Friday. 

Wesley Yang: And then immediately everybody said we’re one of these things.

Erin Friday: Yep. Yeah. 

Wesley Yang: How many friends? Like six or seven?  

Erin Friday: Five. And I won't go into, you know, what happened in the interim. But as she started ninth grade, and this was COVID, and she spent a lot of time on the internet, as most kids did. And most parents, as good as you are at watching what your kids are doing, they're smarter than we are. They know technology much better. And so even checking her phone, you know, she had fake accounts. And so she was in lots of chat rooms with other young girls, and they were all talking about their trans identity, along with all their mental health diagnosis, self-diagnosis that they had chosen. And I sent my daughter to a public school for ninth grade, online, and that public school thought better than me, and changed her name to a male name. Without, of course, informing me, without even so much as meeting my daughter in person. She had never stepped foot on the ground at that school. And–

Wesley Yang: She told them, he/him, or… and they just went ahead and did it?

Erin Friday: Yes. Yeah. Yes. And that was the moment I got…I had to learn very quickly about all of this gender identity.

Wesley Yang: This is not that long ago, this was like 2020?

Erin Friday: Yeah, 2020. Yeah. And luckily for me, Abigail Shrier's book had come out that month. And Lisa Littman’s study had come out. So I did have some resources to look at. And again, being a lawyer, I read everything. And so I just read everything, everything I could possibly read. And, you know, the therapist who we hired gave us the 41% suicide stat, and I asked her about some specifics of that study and it became clear she never even read it. So of course, we fired her. We went through about seven different therapists.

Wesley Yang: And so what were they all saying? They're like, let's get her…let's hook her up to the syringes, or what?

Erin Friday: They weren't that quick. They were just, you know, you need to affirm, you need to call her by her male name, she's going to commit suicide, would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son? One even told me that my history of– my memory of my history of my daughter – was untrue. How she would know that, I don't know. One told me that my daughter's very feminine childhood, and she's a girly-girl much different than I am, was masking her true identity, and she was just waiting for it to bloom. I mean the absurdity of that.

Wesley Yang: So until the seventh grade, there was absolutely no reason to suspect anything?

Erin Friday: Zero. Absolutely zero, and that's, this is pretty common. My story is not unique in any fashion. 

Wesley Yang: And so were you able to reconstruct what got her there and how it happened so quickly? Like yes, okay, she got her lessons in seventh grade, and then what? She was on Reddit, she was on TikTok, what was happening?

Erin Friday: Yeah, so school began it, and then friends insisted - because they also had the language. So they would say things to her, “Oh, you're bossy so you must be a boy.” Because they're all kind of, you know, indoctrinated with the same kind of language. And then it was an older friend, a cool 16-year-old, who really pushed her forward. It was Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube. And then when a child takes on this identity, they become the special, they become, you know, almost - they become untouchable as far as teachers are concerned. I mean you can turn in your projects late, it doesn't really matter because you're trans and you're fragile. And with her friends, you know, she gets this special status because she's the trans kid. 

Wesley Yang: Amazing.

Erin Friday:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, they get stardom. I mean, we see this. We see this in the media as you know, trans kids are paraded around and fawned over, and Ellen –or not Ellen, what's-her-name Page, it isn't Ellen Page –

Wesley Yang: Elliot. 

Erin Friday: Yeah, Elliott. But they get the red carpet. I mean, you know, there's superstardom.

Wesley Yang: So what was the first thing you said to her when she was like “I am male.”

Erin Friday: Well, I probably didn't handle it the right way. Because again, I didn't know what I was walking into. I said, “No, you're not.” Something very similar to that, very direct. Like, that's absurd, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

Wesley Yang: And you had very little, I mean, you knew the trans thing was happening, but you had no idea it would visit you, and so you didn't know that much about any of it, right?

Erin Friday: No, I was blissfully ignorant. Just living my life, I had no idea.

Wesley Yang: And then you learned about it. And then she went deeper into it. And then what happened? I mean, she pulled herself out of it at some point, just on her own?

Erin Friday: No, no, no, no, no, they don't pull themselves out of it on their own. Well, maybe some do. But no, it's a Herculean task to extract your daughter, or child from this. And I took a very aggressive approach. And I don't, I mean, I don't necessarily, well, I do actually advise people to do it. I mean, I took her phone. Her phone was gone for months. I pulled her from the public school. The friend group had to disappear. You really have to – I quit my job, I had to quit my job so that I could dedicate 100% of my time to getting my daughter well. And, you know, I had to hire a psychiatrist out-of-state because I couldn't find anyone in California willing to take on my daughter.

Wesley Yang: For legal reasons, or for culture reasons? Because they would have felt like they would be in danger of practicing conversion therapy, and thus they can't do it?

Erin Friday: Well, they wouldn't say that directly. They would just say, look, we don't, I don't touch those cases. Yeah. So you could read between the lines that this was actually a good psychiatrist, a reputable psychiatrist or psychologist, but they were terrified. Because the law is nuanced. And they don't want to risk their license. And so this is the point of these laws is it silences and it scares providers from actually doing the necessary exploratory mental health assessments on these kids. And everyone else who would accept her were affirmers.

Wesley Yang: Do you, so does she have siblings?

Erin Friday: She does.  

Wesley Yang: And, uh, a father living with you? 

Erin Friday: Yes.

Wesley Yang: So was there, everybody knew that they were all in on the same approach, that the one that you were taking?

Erin Friday: Yes, I was very lucky. My husband walks in tandem with me. And my other son refused to call her anything but her real name, and wasn't buying it either. And so did my extended family, which was, which was really helpful. And again, that was a tool that I used to help extract my daughter from this gender ideology, is if she went to go visit people who love her, people who know her, and who wouldn't buy into this.

Wesley Yang: And so was there some underlying psychological problem, or was it just oh, this is a teenager, and she was taken in by this attractive fad?

Erin Friday: I don't think there was an underlying problem. There became one, however, because what the internet crowd tells these kids —and this is why I had that problem with the word ‘support’ —is that your parents don't support you if they don't support your gender identity. So she had the internet crowd telling her that her parents don't love her, that we're bigots, and that we're horrible people.

And that, I think, was the cause of what then turned out to be depression and anxiety. You can't tell a 13-year-old little girl that the people who have always been in her life, and loved her, and provided for her, don't love her. And that's what the teachers were indicating. Because I was unsafe, right? And that's what the online social media groups, or her social groups were telling her, that I am bad. I mean, they even so much as encouraged her —and this is why SB107 is so bad—they encouraged her to run away. They encouraged her to emancipate.

Wesley Yang: So this was a test of the depths of the foundation that you had built in the prior 13 years, up against everything else in the culture, and seeing the relative strength of those things, and then in the end, the former prevailed. How did that happen?

Ernie Trakas: Hey Wesley, if I could just add a little context to what Erin just related. If Erin, if you're okay with that?

Erin Friday: Go for it. 

Ernie Trakas: Yeah, so I'm involved in litigation in numerous states over the very thing Erin just talked about, and that is, school districts are adopting protocols because they don't have the courage to try to get it through the Board of Education, even though the boards are implicit. They implement these protocols, doing exactly what Erin just described. Teachers are instructed and directed not to involve the parent, to embrace a child’s statement that they are, in fact, questioning, and then develop gender-affirming plans on an ongoing basis, including school counseling, all without the parents now. And so you can see how, just sinister—

Wesley Yang: And in fact conspire to deceive them by continuing to use the original name, while using the new name in class, right?

Ernie Trakas: That is absolutely correct. It's intentionally misleading the parent, not just to dissuade but this is–

Wesley Yang: This is not legal, right? Like this is a violation of constitutional rights. Am I correct about that?

Ernie Trakas: That's every one of the lawsuits we filed and I've gotten involved in at least four, and more coming, are framed on that basis. Exactly right.

Wesley Yang: Do you have any reason to think that the Supreme Court is going to say otherwise?

Ernie Trakas: Never. Not a bit. Again, the problem is, it will take the most, the oldest case, gets to the Supreme Court will probably be no less than five years. That’s the problem.

Wesley Yang: And in order to get there, you have to have some court saying, no, you don't have a right to the identity of your child. And I guess you know that there will be many courts along the way that will do that. That will get you there. 

Ernie Trakas: Correct. Yeah. And so, you know, like I said, it's just frustrating for the parents because there's precious few attorneys that will take this type of case on, and because you're looking at Hercules, in a sense, in terms of the infrastructure that can be lined up against you, both in terms of numbers and dollars, to drag this stuff.

Wesley Yang: The federal government, the Disney Corporation, everything that they're paying. Like, you're up against corporate America. You're up against the media. Just all of them doing this for cosmetic or virtue-signaling reasons, and just very happy to use the kids as weapons and all of this. And if they end up permanently caught up and sterilized, you know, well that was your choice. That was who you were. That's what you told us. That’s just, it's just incredible what they're doing.

Erin Friday: California did this before. They sterilized a slew of mentally ill children. They just paid out last year reparations for what they've done. And they're doing it again.

Wesley Yang: And so how does, you know, it happened starting in 2020, and you managed to pull her out in two years? Or less? Or what happened?

Erin Friday: Yes, I swam upstream. I, yeah, I pulled out all the stops. I made it clear to my child that I didn't believe any of this. I left out, I left out all my trans books. She saw me going to protests. I made it very clear on what my belief system was on this. And then I employed a series of just, you know, drive-by questions to her. And would open up, she's a smart kid. I mean most of these kids are really smart, and if he can create a little crack, it goes, it goes really far. 

I would ask her, what is it about you that you believe you're a boy? And she would answer, “I don't like my breasts.” And so my response would be like, “Okay, you just told me why you don't like being a girl.  Why do you think you're a boy?” And there's no answer. You know, and you walk away. So there's methods that one can employ, but I think probably the most impactful is to get them offline. Which is difficult depending on the age of the child, it's difficult.

Wesley Yang: That's what I've told my 8-year-old daughter that she'll get a phone at the age of 16. She believes that now. I don't know if we'll actually be able to do that. But it does seem like those are the vulnerable years in which they become susceptible to all kinds of horrors. This, it just happens to be the case that this horror has been adopted as the new civil rights clause by one of the major parties. I don't think there's anything, there's never been anything like that. Right? It's as if the President said that all should worship Slenderman or, or whatever else, right? Whatever other internet meme that is out there. So, how long ago was it that she sort of came to you and was like, oh, yeah, like, I'm actually a girl?

Erin Friday: Well, it doesn't actually happen, it doesn't happen that way – it's just not that direct. But it happens, as slow as they get into it, they come out of it just as slowly. And it's baby steps. 

So it happened at around Christmas time that she started to change the clothes that she was wearing. And she never came out and said, “I'm now a girl.” Those are hard things for these kids to do. Because, you know, they dig in. They dig in really deep and they don't want to be wrong. And I don't think my daughter has the acumen right now to even understand the bullet she dodged, or how this happened. She still, of course, blames me for everything, which is, you know the….right, that's, you know, that's the job of the mom, I get blamed for everything, right? But I'll take it. I mean, I'll take it any day.

Wesley Yang: Because you made your position adamant – adamant from the beginning– she never got to the point where she started to like demand, you know, hormones or blockers or other interventions, or was that something that she was attempting to get you to do?

Erin Friday: She did talk about wanting to get her breasts removed. But she said that she would wait until she was 25. So, but she didn't really push any of that, she really was pushing more of the social, the social transition that we needed to refer to her as a boy, we needed to get her boy haircuts, and only buy her boy clothes, and things of that nature, which we wouldn't do. We did for actually a short period of time because–

Wesley Yang: Was she, did she make some credible efforts to look like a boy, or was it not that credible?

Erin Friday: Well, it was pretty credible. She cut her hair. I mean, they do, again, it's a uniform these kids do. And it's not actually very different from the uniform I wore as I started to develop a figure. We're young, we're uncomfortable being sexual, and we're foisted into it because we grow breasts and we grow hips, and we get a figure that, you know, men look at. When you're 12 and 13, you don't really want that and you don't really know how to handle it. So I probably dressed exactly like she did with, you know, big baggy sweatshirts and jeans that covered me up. But, you know, she took it one step further and got the, you know, the boy haircut, and was wearing a binder.

Wesley Yang: And she did not look or sound, she did not sound less like a girl than she did two years ago. Is that right?

Erin Friday: No. And her behavior was exactly the same. I mean, I have a son, and they're close in age, and they can't be any more different in their likes, what they watch on TV, You know, emotional state.

Wesley Yang: Right. So there was no alteration in any of that with her, there was just a declaration, and then the clothes. And then, but then, you know, your son had the wherewithal to - he's been exposed to whatever same propaganda that she's been - right? But it seems like in general, boys are not as impressionable, and are still willing to say no, of course, you are still going to use your name, and you’re a girl. And so I guess that ended up being a helpful stimulus.

Erin Friday: Yeah, and it's also, not to pat myself on the back, or, but it also is a testament to the fact that there were outside influences that made my daughter think this. These kids grew up together. They went to the same school. You know, they walked in tandem. That there was a big push from the internet crowd pushing her into this. And I could see that through all of her searches, because I did get into her phone, and I could see the conversations that were going on, and the websites that she looked at, and you know, the “Am I trans” tests that she took. Which I invite anybody to take one because you'll all pass with flying colors.

Wesley Yang: So you knew there are actual people out there, that she was in contact with, who are saying, you know, your parents are the problem if they don’t affirm. And, oh, there's gonna be laws in California that will allow you to emancipate yourself. And like, these influences were whispering in her ear, and they were an important part of her worlds. And you dealt with that by just denying her access to the internet. Is that it?

Erin Friday: Pretty much. Yeah. There was one conversation –this is just horrible– one conversation where, you know, and I would look up these people and try to find who they were, but they were telling her to kick my head in.

Wesley Yang: Did you think that they could win? Or do you think that it's possible they could have won had you not, sort of, devoted yourself to not allowing them to win?

Erin Friday: Absolutely. Who's on my side in California? Who was there to help me? The pediatrician wasn't there to help me. There were no medical providers there to help me. The schools were against me. The teachers were against me. Politicians are against me. I mean, the fact that we survived this is, to me, amazing. It shouldn't be that way.

Wesley Yang: And so you're in a parent group, is it a local one, or is it a larger one?

Erin Friday: It's national. And so we have various branches. And of course California has multiple branches because we are in the belly of the beast.

Wesley Yang: And so you share reports of victories and also of losses with this group? I’m very interested in the group.

Erin Friday: Yes, we support each other with ideas of how to handle when a school won't use the right name and pronouns. We share, I mean, there's an underground railroad now of providers that will, do not, we'll call it non-affirming care. And we keep those secrets, and we pass them to each other. We, you know–

Wesley Yang: They have to vet who they take on very carefully because it could be, you know, a defector or somebody trying to catch them out?

Erin Friday: Perhaps. Yeah, I mean,it's really, truly an underground railroad. We keep everything close to the vest. We support each other when there's a court hearing. We'll all show up. Either through Zoom or in person. We fight legislation together. It's a pretty powerful group.

Wesley Yang: What's the size?

Erin Friday: So our northern California [group] is around 100, and that goes up and down. We seem to be growing at a faster clip. I get, you know, I got two new people last week. Then we have a, you know, we have an LA group. We have a San Diego group. And we're, we were pretty hard to find, now I think we're easier to find.

Wesley Yang: 100 members, all of whom have an ROGD kid?

Erin Friday: Correct. And that's the tip of the iceberg. I know, in my daughter's class, her class from middle school, I know at least eight girls. And I don't know where those parents are. I do - two of them are in my group - but I don't know where the other parents are. A couple blocks over, there's two kids on the block. I mean, it's a contagion. It's everywhere. If you ask someone randomly in a grocery store in California whether they know someone who has a trans-identified child, they'll tell you yes. You know, I’d bet 20 bucks, they'll tell you yes.

Wesley Yang: And so it's just, it's a normal thing in those neighborhoods to say, oh, how's you know, how’s Sarah? And they'll be like, oh, it's, you know, it's Sam now or whatever? Right? Like, that’s not an unusual thing to have happen?

Erin Friday: Yeah, I don't know what, you know, whether the parents accept the new name or not.

Wesley Yang: Right. Well, I mean, in those cases, you do have parents that are accepting the name, right? And who, you know, who are sharing in the moral celebrity of the kids. I mean, I think there must be a lot of that, especially around LA, right?

Erin Friday: Well, there's, well, there's that. And I don't want to be too hard on those parents. I am hard on the ones who are parading their kids around and celebrating the identity. But it's very difficult to swim upstream here. And it takes a lot of strength. And some parents lose all their ability to be rational when they are faced with medical professionals telling them that their child will commit suicide. And that's a terrifying thing for a parent to hear. And so they capitulate even though they know that it's not the right thing, but they are so afraid. And some of these children are really fragile. They're not doing well, because again, they're being told, by everyone, there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with your body. You were born in the wrong body. And your parents don't love you.

These kids are, they don't have an easy time. And the parents want to do anything to keep their kids safe and alive. And they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. They think that just by using a name and a pronoun that that might save their child. And then it moves to the next stage, to hormones. They don't know that once they're on the train, there's no getting off the train.

Wesley Yang: So what is your sense of the likelihood that this terrifying law that we've just described will be the law? Is it a virtual certainty? Is it much more likely than not that this thing is going to be a law within a few months?

Erin Friday: What do you think, Ernie?

Ernie Trakas: You’re closer to it than me, Erin. I have no real good sense on where the California Legislature is. But given it’s California, I would suspect that this thing will get passed by one means or another.

Erin Friday: Yeah, it's going to pass. It's going to pass unless we can somehow turn some Democrats to pay attention to this. And stop, and I don't know why they're not. I mean, the writing's on the wall. Parents are restless. Democratic parents are restless. We are a force to be reckoned with and we're getting louder. We're joining forces with the Republicans, with the Evangelicals, with the radical feminists, with the religious right. We're all working together to fight this. We're a big voting block, and I don't know why they don't see that. But maybe 2022, when the elections go through, they'll see it more. But right now, they’re so confident that I'm a bigot crazy loon, and that I don't have support, and they're just wrong.

Ernie Trakas: And that's in the face of what happened in the school board elections in San Francisco. The recall of the LAPD, the recall of the San Francisco - not PD - the prosecutor. I'm sorry. I mean, it's almost like they're not capable of objective review of what's going on.

Wesley Yang: So, you know, in San Francisco in order to recall the school board members and to recall Boudin, they, you know, tens of thousands of normal San Franciscans, who have the baseline progressive views of San Francisco residents, had to allow themselves to be called white supremacists every day for 11 months, right, by unhinged online activists. But they knew what their interests were and they were able to act in accordance with them. And these were interests that were not affirmed anywhere in the media. They were not recognized as being legitimate by any of the institutions that I think, most of them not so long ago, looked to, to confer legitimacy on their sentiments and their actions. They were able to spontaneously, on a peer-to-peer basis, without, you know, in defiance of what the media consensus was, to act in coordination with one another to achieve a result. 

And so what you're telling me is that even though this is an issue that all the Democrats have, you know, none of them feel that they can break ranks on, even if some of them have misgivings. And I don't know if any one of them has ever confided in you that they have private misgivings, but the politics of it are such that they have to go along. Maybe that's happened, maybe it hasn't. You can answer that when you respond. But what you're telling me is that, in fact, among parents of ROGD youth, who are witnessing a social contagion in their midst, among their own children, that they know to be fed by what's being taught in schools. There's a real process that is not being recognized that is going to let itself be known come November, is that right? Is that even possible in California?

Erin Friday: We're working on it. We're working on it. And yeah, there's an army out there, and we're getting together. There's an army of parents who are not in this ROGD space, who are well aware of their children being indoctrinated at public schools. And they're not happy. They're not happy that their kindergarteners are being taught that their sex bodies may not actually mean, what we know to be true. And those are the parents that I really need to stand up. Because the parents of ROGD kids are, you know, they're fighting right now tooth-and-nail for their child. They can't give any more time. I need the parents of the kindergarteners and the first graders who should know that these teachers, that there are indoctrinating teachers in their schools, who are reading these kids I am Jazz, and these trans books in secret. As you know, I don't know if you know the lawsuit here in California, but we know this is happening. They're holding LGBTQ clubs, and these clubs are not about the L and the G and the B, they're all about the T. They're holding them at lunchtime, for fourth and fifth graders to keep secrets from their parents. We need those parents to come out with the pitchforks. Because they have a lot to lose. They don't want to ever, I wouldn't wish what happened to my family, on anyone. They don't want to be in my situation, or in the situation we were in.

Wesley Yang: Do you think they will? Are there institutions that are mustering their energies? 

Erin Friday: Yep. Yep, there are.

Wesley Yang:  Okay. Well, look to both of you, I want to follow up with both of you, and do more reporting, look at the cases. Because I've mostly been kind of skimming the surface on social media, seeing what ends up, shows up there. But I have a strong sense and now I've started to interview people. And I realized what's happening. I talked to a guy, a teacher in Wisconsin, who was like yeah, you know, there's multiple classrooms right now where they have a transition closet and they are…it's just like a normal public school, public high school in Wisconsin, not in like La Jolla, or whatever, right? It's in the heartland. It's in regular public schools, and it's not questioned. The teachers are fully bought in. They just think they're doing a nice thing, because that's what they've been told. And that's what they're telling everybody else. So it isn't even like they're perceiving themselves as being these crazy radicals, they've just had their baseline shifted by this process. And so, that's going to be the difficulty of it. 

And I saw it here when, totally coincidentally, I took my daughter to this reading, and then there was this guy, reading to a bunch of 4 or 5-year-olds, a book about some pride parade with leather men in it. And, you know, my daughter was too young to understand, and so I wasn't that disturbed. And of course all the other parents are acting like this is the most normal thing in the world. 

And then I just started to notice what books the librarians were stocking in a public library that caters mostly, you know, to fairly Orthodox Jews. But it's like, you have these, these race and LGBTQ books, and it's just like, they all went over the waterfall together, and I'm in Canada. I'm in a relative backwater, you know, relative to these other places. So I know that if it's here, it's pervasive everywhere else. It's a drastic transformation in the culture industries, and everybody who's involved in making culture is on board, and everyone in a position to decide is on board. And as a result, it is manifesting in these things that I think are just clearly going to be unwelcome to the vast majority of parents. 

I don't know how to undo what has been done, because so many things have to be undone. Right? In order to unmake this phenomenon called, you know, the trans kids. And it's a phenomenon that has been not that many years in the making. Like, from Tumblr memes in 2011 to, as recently as 2017, you know, the idea of “trans women are women” was kind of, you know, still something you could kind of laugh at. Or, you know, the idea of the female penis, still something you kind of laugh at in 2019, and somehow it all got very serious. And then is manifesting in these other things. 

But there is this question of like, oh, do the really bad things only affect a very small handful of people? And my thought was, well, you know, I just don't think the parents like obvious propaganda that is obviously untrue being directed at their young children. Anyway, I want to talk to you about reporting all of this stuff out because it is kind of the most amazing thing happening in the country, and the most distressing.

Erin Friday: Well, thank you, Wesley. I would love to come back on and talk about what's happening at the schools and what parents can do to stop it - because an average parent can be involved and help stem this tide. Because the tail on this is going to be longer than the opioid crisis. The tail is going to be long because these kids are getting indoctrinated at kindergarten now. And there are things parents can do that are effective.

Ernie Trakas: Yeah, to add to what Erin said, Wesley, I’d love to come back on with you just so that your listeners know that you're talking to somebody that's represented public school districts for more than two decades. I sue them now. But my point is, I've seen the beast up close and personal, and it is pervasive and uniform. And that's the only silver lining of the pandemic is it finally got parents to the place where they started to scrutinize exactly what was going on in schools. It's a huge agenda, a huge movement, backed by teachers unions with a ton of money. So it's going to take a concerted effort and it’s going to take people like Erin to speak out at every opportunity. And that's the only way, and of course, litigation, that’s the only way that that momentum is going to be stopped.

Wesley Yang: Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I will have you on again, and I will be in touch with both of you. And do you have time to take a couple questions? Sure. 

Okay. So there's somebody waiting in the queue, there may be a couple of others who want to join. We'll just take a few and then we'll wrap things up. You want to go next, you want to ask a question, Andrew? If you're not there, I'm going to remove you from the queue in five seconds. If somebody else wants to join, they can enter. And if not, we'll just call it a day. So I'm going to remove you now and invite anybody else that has a question to pose one. And if no one appears in the next 10 seconds or so, we'll just call it a day. 

Very fascinating discussion. In my view, these are all things that I have read about, and had talked to people about, but not in such detail before. 

Okay, so no more questions. Thanks Erin and Ernie for joining me. 

Ernie Trakas: Happy to do it. Thank you. 

Wesley Yang: This has been another episode of Conversations in Year Zero.

Erin Friday: Thank you, and have a good weekend. 

Ernie Trakas: Take care.

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