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In Some States, Parents Risk Losing Custody for Rejecting Child’s Transgender Identity | Erin Friday
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- [00:00]
Erin Friday
Because Child Protective Services had come to my house when my daughter ran away. I didn't feel like I could call the police because I already had a black mark on me. So for an entire night, I sat up crying, worried about my child without any help.
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Narrator
When Child Protective Services showed up at her door, Erin Friday faced every parent's worst nightmare.
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Janja Kellogg
Get out of the schools.
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Narrator
Today I sit down with the co lead of ARD Duty usa, an attorney and parental rights advocate.
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Erin Friday
My daughter believed that she was a male, a boy. After being indoctrinated at her school and suffering through depression and anxiety. You must change your language. You must use my pronouns. You must look at me differently. You must allow me into your bathrooms, into your sacred spaces.
- [00:53]
Narrator
Friday pushes back on the idea that parents who oppose gender affirming care for children are are driven by hate.
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Erin Friday
I loved my child so much that I accepted her as being perfect without any need of needles and surgeries. We're not hateful, we're actually loving.
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Narrator
What began as one mother's struggle soon opened her eyes to a larger what's really driving the rapid expansion of gender clinics?
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Erin Friday
Each gender questioning child is worth about $1.5 million to the medical. Why is this happening? The easiest one to understand is money.
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Narrator
For Erin Friday, saving her daughter became both a calling and a warning to other parents. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jania Kellick.
- [01:43]
Janja Kellogg
Erin Friday, Such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
- [01:47]
Erin Friday
Thank you so much for inviting me.
- [01:50]
Janja Kellogg
So I want to paint a scenario from your life. Your daughter runs away from home. You're thinking about calling the police, but you realize you can't. Child Protective Services has been called on you inappropriately. But you know if you make that call, you'll get a black mark on your record and you could end up losing her. Tell me about what happened and you know how it got to that?
- [02:19]
Erin Friday
Well, it goes back to when I found out that my daughter, who was 13 years old, just starting high school, was secretly socially transitioned at school, meaning that the school started to call my daughter by a male name, use male pronouns. And when I called the school and told them to stop that next week, Child Protective Services was at my door. The next day, the police. And that was an immediate alert to me that the school wants to know better than wants to parent my child and that if I didn't follow and call my daughter a boy, that Child Protective Services may come and take my child away. And at the time, I didn't really know how dangerous the situation was. I later Learned that parents in Southern California had lost custody of their children because she wouldn't transition her daughter, she wouldn't call her daughter a male, and CPS took her child. So now I knew that I already had a black mark. And a few months later, my daughter ran away. And the normal thing for a parent to do is to ask law enforcement to help find your child. She's 13, female, alone at night. It's 2 o' clock in the morning, 3 o' clock in the morning. And I can't make that phone call because I know that there's already a file opened up on me and that Child protective services can swoop in anytime and take my child.
- [04:06]
Janja Kellogg
So many things going through my head. Okay, at this moment, is this a kind of blackmail? Like, how do you describe this scenario that, you know, if you don't basically follow what these people are demanding of you, you might lose your child?
- [04:23]
Erin Friday
Well, it's coercion at its highest level. It's telling a parent that you either need to transition your child or you don't get to keep your child. It's forcing a parent to socially transition their child and later medicalize their child. Puts them in a position of. The worst position a parent could be in is knowing that the government is coming after you because you believe in biological sex. You want to raise your daughter as a daughter that you know, you birthed, that you know, no human has ever changed sex. And you have the government telling you, no, you're abusive, you don't get to parent your child. The government knows better. This is America. This is insane.
- [05:18]
Janja Kellogg
So it's sort of like they messed with the wrong person here. That's kind of what I'm thinking right now. But tell me a little bit more about your background. Just kind of maybe to lighten the mood for a moment.
- [05:31]
Erin Friday
Sure. So I'm no wallflower. I'm a licensed attorney. So I knew what my rights were. And I also wasn't going to be bullied that easily. So I was very lucky Child Protective services did not come back to my house. I think I must have told them seven or eight times during the interview that I was an attorney. So they moved on to other, easier prey to take children from other parents who wouldn't be able to put up such a fight.
- [06:04]
Janja Kellogg
Okay, but tell me, like, you decided to not just be happy with the fact that it worked out, you decided to take this head on 100%.
- [06:18]
Erin Friday
So as soon as I started to learn about the whole of gender ideology that these schools were socially transitioning These kids behind parents back that the government was promoting this, that young girls were getting their breasts removed as part of this ideology. First I weighed it and I said, who's fighting this? Why isn't the where is this in the news? I came from the left. I watched CNN and the New York Times. I didn't see anything about this. And so I was waiting for the Calvary to come. And I joined all these different groups. I joined the radical feminists and I started just googling all groups that were fighting this. And I realized that nobody was really fighting for the parents. And I made a deal. I'm not sure who the deal is with, but I made a deal that if I could safeguard my daughter from this, which I did, that I would help save other parents and save other children. And that's the deal I made five years ago. And I'm a person of my word.
- [07:35]
Janja Kellogg
So. But okay, tell me a little bit more about your daughter. What was her state when this conversation happened? And like when child protective services was called, was she believing she was a boy? Like, where was her head at?
- [07:50]
Erin Friday
Yes. So this was Covid and she was isolating. Like many of these young girls living virtually through a computer. Avatars. She was going through puberty, not liking the changes that are going on with her body. Cut her long hair, you know, changed from being very feminine to trying to be masculine. Like it was almost kind of comical. She tried to learn how to burp and would forcibly sit with her legs apart, trying to mimic what she thought a male would do, but it really wasn't funny. She decided that she was a boy and she made that pronouncement. And when she did, or right around that time, she went into a deep depression. They go into a deep depression because to believe that you're transgender is to believe that you are born in the wrong body, that everything is wrong with you. And the only way to be fixed is going to a surgeon's office. So that's a horrible thing for a young girl to believe that they are wrong. And so she had, you know, she had those thoughts going through her head and then on top of it, she's told that parents who don't go along with the gender identity of her choosing are bigots, hateful, don't care for her. And that's all over the Internet, that we parents are monsters for not, you know, supporting, affirming their children. And do that to a 13 year old girl who's going through Covid, isolated, not in school, depressed. It was horrifying for her. And horrifying for our whole family.
- [09:40]
Janja Kellogg
Did people try to convince you that you were wrong?
- [09:46]
Erin Friday
Oh, 100%. So I think I went to about seven different doctors. All of them advised me to transition her. I couldn't find anyone who was curious as to why she felt this way. I only found people who told me that she would commit suicide unless I called her a boy. That was it.
- [10:11]
Janja Kellogg
What's the veracity of that statement?
- [10:14]
Erin Friday
Am I allowed to curse? No, it's untrue. That's been debunked for a long time. It's used as a cudgel to again give parents a Sophie's Choice Live son, dead daughter. I can't tell you how many times I heard that, but it's a lie. These children become depressed and upset with themselves and who they are. They hate the reflection in the mirror because they believe that they're born wrong. It's not because a parent isn't supporting them in that horrible belief. So it's actually the opposite. It's hateful and horrible to tell a child you are wrong. And that's when I think the suicidality really is more prevalent. It is post transition because they're not loved as themselves, which is the person in the mirror, not a creation.
- [11:15]
Janja Kellogg
Right. And I mean, I wonder. I haven't. I wonder. I'm sure there's someone that's studied that now. I don't know. I haven't looked at that particular body of literature around the issue, but that makes sense to me, what you're saying.
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Erin Friday
Well, there is literature on it.
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Janja Kellogg
Tell me more about it.
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Erin Friday
So there's the NIH study, which followed four gender clinics in the United States. The biggest ones, in the first year, two out of the 315 adolescents killed themselves. Now, these were children who were supported by their parents in their trans identity, were at either UCSF or Boston Children's, the biggest gender clinics in the country, and they committed suicide. Now, those numbers are buried often. We also have studies out of Sweden and out of Denmark. The Swedish study went 30 years back and it's 19 times higher suicide rate post surgical transition. So it's a very high rate after.
- [12:26]
Janja Kellogg
What's happening with your daughter now?
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Erin Friday
Well, she's very happy in her female body, thank God, and she's a young adult and she has all her body parts.
- [12:39]
Janja Kellogg
But it was hard at the beginning, I'm guessing, right? Like, she didn't. She really believed that she was a boy. I'm trying to understand, like, the process to get to the situation. You just.
- [12:52]
Erin Friday
Well, they Go through it slowly. It's a very slow process. So it really started when she went to her sex ed class in seventh grade, where they planted the seed, where they spent an hour on gender identity in the sex ed curriculum. It was a five hour course, the last hour, all gender identity. And it had pictures. Cause I looked at it, I looked at the curriculum. It has pictures of a boy body with an arrow pointing, saying girl brain. So it was all based on lies. So that's implanted in these kids, and it is reinforced through school, then it's reinforced through social media. So when a child then is distressed and they're trying to understand what is causing them not to have a big group of friends or why do they feel awkward or uncomfortable in their bodies? Well, they have an easy answer. It's because they're born in the wrong one. And so that is an easy solution. And you can Google this. You can put in, am I trans? And you'll get a very simple questionnaire. And we're all trans, by the way. You'll take the test and you'll be trans too. And these. So during COVID and these distressing time, she took on the identity. She moved along the LGBTQ Alphabet. They usually do. They start at lesbian, and then they move to non binary, and then they move to transgender. And then it lands, and then it's real. And then they go into a spiral, a deep depression. And the anger that these children have towards then their parents is almost indescribable. The hate that she tossed my way was excruciating. But you take it as a parent, because, you know, when a child is really angry, it's a sign of severe depression when they're yelling at the person who loves them most. It's not that they hate their parents, it's that they're hurting. But it causes a lot of parents to capitulate because they see their child spiraling down. And then they hear from the medical providers, you must do this. This is the only pathway. This is the way to save your child. So these parents believe it. And I don't blame them. I mean, they didn't read the studies I read. It's a lot of reading. It's a lot of searching on the Internet to actually understand what was going on.
- [15:29]
Janja Kellogg
Well, and they try, you know, they have some trust of the experts too. Right. Somehow you were able to see through that.
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Erin Friday
Right. When you have the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest pediatric society in the country, saying you need to transition these children, who's the layperson who's going to compete against that? They're not. And even doctors just blindly follow that. They don't think critically. When have we ever treated a mental illness by cutting off body parts? Well, now we do that.
- [16:10]
Janja Kellogg
I want to talk a little bit about, you know, you being sort of activated, you know, realizing there's this whole, well, this terrible world, right, where children are being harmed and you kind of, you made the deal. That's interesting. I have a deal like that in my life too. You can talk about it later, I suppose. But you decided you were going to dedicate yourself. I think that's the way to put it. And one of the areas that you've decided to dedicate yourself is to helping these families that have had their children taken by Child Protective Services. Tell me more about. Hold this picture. I don't remember the term, but there's a pipeline. Once someone gets pulled, they get pushed into. Maybe you can kind of explain to me what happens once they get taken by Child Protective Services.
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Erin Friday
Sure. So what these children are first of all being taught through the Internet. And actually I have evidence of school counselors telling children how to use child protective services to get away from their parents who refuse to, you know, capitulate and call them another gender. And so once that child then gets into the crosshairs of Child Protective Services, the child can be taken and placed in a temporary foster care family. And I like to call them glitter families or chosen families because these are affirming families. And during that interim, the parents are being investigated and they can be investigated just from not calling their child a male or female name, whichever the child wants. Once the child is in foster care, there are foster care Bill of Rights. In many of the blue states, those Bill of rights require that the child be housed based on gender identity, I.e. share a bedroom based on gender identity, not their sex. In California, our Child Protective services goes up to the age of 24. So a 24 year old male body could be sharing a bedroom with a 13 year old female body as long as she identifies as a male or vice versa. So we take a child and put them in a very vulnerable position. The Bill of rights also allows the child to get sex rejecting interventions. So now you cast the parents aside, you don't need consent from the parents anymore. You get child and government consent to cross sex hormones, puberty blockers, name change and it's parents essentially lose their parental rights to the government as long as those parents refuse to transition their children. So that's how it goes. And these children Are taught also to make false claims of abuse. Not just emotional abuse, but physical abuse. And these cases, we don't hear about them very often because they under law, many laws, they are sealed or there's confidentiality requirements so nobody knows. The parents can even go to the press about what is happening to their child.
- [19:53]
Janja Kellogg
I understand there's numerous court cases that parents are involved in right now trying to reclaim their children that are in this situation.
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Erin Friday
There's quite a few cases across the country in which the parent has sued the child protective agencies or social workers for violating their parental rights. Thus far, those cases have not been that successful. The judges are finding legal technicalities to avoid really adjudicating whether parents have a right to raise their child as their sex. That's what the question is. Do parents have the right to raise their children as their sex? How they were born, how they were made naturally. So there are lawsuits going across the country, but this is happening in red states and blue states. Georgia has a case going on and it's very difficult for these parents to keep fighting for the trans identified child too. These parents are bankrupt. They are asked to jump through hoops. They are required to be re educated, go through trainings. And as that's happening, the clock is ticking and that child is getting more indoctrinated because the child is being placed with a family or in an institution where they're being affirmed as the opposite sex. And the clock is going. So that child is aging and there's an end time when the child is now an adult. So there's nothing left except tears for these parents. And then there's other instances where a parent, I know, a mother in Oregon, I think she has four children. She had child protective services open three separate investigations against her because of her trans identified daughter who eventually ran away. But child protective services still went after her because the child had run away. Police would not return the child back to her. But she has other children. So if she was determined to be an abuser as to this one child, she would lose the others. So this mother, sorry, this is going to get emotional. This mother emancipated, relinquished her parental rights to this trans identified daughter to save her other three children. And that is horrifying. She sacrificed her one daughter to the transgender culture so that she could safeguard her other children. And that should never be, never be.
- [23:15]
Janja Kellogg
Why do you call it the transgender cult?
- [23:18]
Erin Friday
Because that's exactly what it is. It has all of the attributes of a cult, except there is no one supreme leader. The supreme leader is Self. So a cult, what does a cult do? It indoctrinates you with mantras. Trans women are women. Trans kids, you know, deserve rights. So you have, you know these mantras, you have forced education, you have the pulling away of the family. I mean, that's the biggest thing from a cult, Right? Separate the people who truly love the victim and separate them. Create a new family, a new community for them. And then the supreme leader itself in this cult, because trans identified people want you and want the parents to all speak the way they want you to speak. You must recognize that that man is actually a woman, that that woman is actually a man. You must change your language. You must use my pronouns. You must look at me differently. You must allow me into your bathrooms, into your sacred spaces. It's a cult and you know it's. And it's a social contagion through the cult.
- [24:59]
Janja Kellogg
Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about the social contagion aspect. I mean, it's been covered. Abigail Schreier has written on it quite a bit. But do you know at this point as we're recording like what the status of that contagion is? Because during COVID there was sort of an explosion of it, if I recall, right?
- [25:19]
Erin Friday
Yes. So there's been some reporting that there's been a dip, there's at least a dip in youth saying that they're non binary. But I don't see any slowing down of the trans identity whatsoever. The social contagion is rampant. And it started first with the girls, which is normally how social contagions work. Anorexia, bulimia, we know this going back to the laughing social contagion, the dancing social contagion, hysteria. It always started with the young girls because they want to be liked, they're easily influenced. And then it moves over to the boys, which is where we are now. But it's continuing. They want the social contagion to continue. This is why they have trans identified cartoon characters. This is why Disney has it. This is why it's on cereal boxes, why they're teaching it in TK and kindergarten, is they want to keep building gender confused children because it's a steady stream of money and it's a massive way to blow up the family because that's what it does, it destroys the family.
- [26:40]
Janja Kellogg
So, okay, interesting, you mentioned a few kind of motivation factors here. One is the destruction of the family. That's super interesting because that's like a core communist goal, right? A sort of, you know, the state asserts control. Okay, what did you mention you Mentioned the family, mentioned money. Right. And there's also this element of just, you know, manifesting the ideology that you've come to believe. I guess that would be another one. Right.
- [27:13]
Erin Friday
Well, when we look at the why, why is this happening? And there it's very multifaceted. The easiest one to understand is money. We know that these children are worth lots of money to the medical communities. I think Tennessee Vanderbilt, admit it, these are cash cows. These children are perpetual medical patients.
- [27:38]
Janja Kellogg
I remember. Okay, let me just jump in. I remember seeing these transcripts, right. Of. That's shocking to me. Can you just explain what happened? What did they admit to? Like, how did they admit.
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Erin Friday
Well, they talked about how lucrative gender clinics are. Let me put this in perspective. Lupron, which is a puberty blocker that is surgically inserted into a child's arm to prevent them from growing up. That can cost up to $150,000 to insert that Hospitals profit margins are very, very razor thin. $150,000 to insert a puberty blocker into a child and then repeat visits and then you put them on cross sex hormones and then you have surgeries. I mean, these children are worth a lot of money. And then all the harms that come from that, because there are many. Even if the child does indeed transition, there's a lot of things that happen to the body. When you put females on male level, testosterone cancers emerge. So they are always paying dividends to the medical community. So the money's there for these surgeons and for these hospitals. And they knew it and they ran with it. It's a good profit center and our government paid for it.
- [29:18]
Janja Kellogg
Medicaid until recently.
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Erin Friday
That's right. But in California we're still paying for this.
- [29:27]
Janja Kellogg
I just remembered something. You mentioned something earlier, the term that people might not be familiar with. And you said sex rejecting and I think you're referring to sex rejecting procedures. This terminology that I think Bobby Kennedy was first used in his address when they introduced this new report, the umbrella study on. Of all the studies on gender dysphoria treatment and so forth. So this is a. I mean this term monology is not something I'd heard before. Can you speak to that a little bit?
- [29:59]
Erin Friday
Well, we wanted to take back some of the language because the language has been manipulated. Gender affirming care. Brilliant. Gender affirming care. It has a nice ring to it that we all have a gender. Sorry, but I don't believe any of us have a gender, a gendered soul. We have a sex. We are sexed human beings. That's it. So we wanted to find terms, especially lawyers. We have to be very careful. But how these judges are coming down with these rulings. There's no such thing as a trans child. I don't use that terminology because it doesn't. It's a fiction and it makes it real. So there's no such thing as gender affirming care. There's only sex rejecting care, which is you're rejecting that you are a male or a female, what you actually are, and you're trying to make your body mimic the opposite sex. So it makes perfect sense to use the right terminology so people can hear it. You're rejecting your body. You're not affirming anything. You're rejecting.
- [31:09]
Janja Kellogg
So, of course, you're in California. As you just mentioned, there's been a pretty significant shift in how the federal government approaches this issue. I'm just wondering if you could tell me what has shifted. And then the second part will be, what impact has that had at the level at which you operate?
- [31:31]
Erin Friday
Well, thank God for President Trump. Never thought those words would come out of my mouth, but here we are super appreciative of what this administration is doing. So the federal government, for the Department of Ed, the Department of Education, has come down very hard on California for Title 9 violations. Now, we're all in litigation with this, so we'll see where it goes. But were very likely to be successful in withholding federal dollars because California allows men to be in our bathrooms and in our sports. So that's one big thing that the administration has done. Because of the administration, with the executive orders, we've had a lot of gender clinics at hospitals shut down. Now, on paper, that is a huge win. And I don't want to underestimate, like, we want to celebrate that, but these doctors have just moved over and put up shingles elsewhere. So they're still doing it. They're just doing it not connected to a hospital. The DOJ is investigating California for, you know, some of these false medical ICD codes that they're using to hide the fact that they're performing sex rejecting interventions on children.
- [33:05]
Janja Kellogg
You're gonna have to lay that out for me a little bit more. So it's something to do with how the procedure is being described, but is this being described fraudulently? Can you just unpack that for me?
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Erin Friday
That's correct. So they'll put a code in for a woman and say that he, even though it's a female, is not producing enough testosterone and is testosterone deficient and use a code for that, well, that's not true because women are not supposed to have that level of testosterone. They will use codes such as endocrine disorder, unspecified to give a child puberty blockers, to hide the fact that they're blocking a child's puberty because that child or parent believes that that child is a different sex. So they're manipulating data and that's illegal. And the federal government is going to come down hard and swift on that. The Federal Trade Commission had a roundtable in July where they allowed all of us to come and speak and talk about all the fraud and deception. And we're waiting for the FTC to start moving on it. But we parents and other advocates, we have been stockpiling evidence for a very long time and we finally get to share it. Because it is a lie that gender interventions are life saving. That is a lie. It is a lie that they are medically necessary. And that's the purview of the FTC is you cannot do that. You cannot say that a treatment is life saving when it's not.
- [34:58]
Janja Kellogg
So. And this is what's being litigated, the.
- [35:01]
Erin Friday
Questions, some of it's in litigation and some of it is beginning. So the FTC, I think, served 20 plus subpoenas on different hospitals. And I know that this administration has really two strong edicts, which is immigration and gender. And they're following through with the gender piece and they're using every tool at their disposal to shut this down, even in blue states.
- [35:32]
Janja Kellogg
Well, so that's exactly what I wanted to ask you. You mentioned, of course, there's a whole bunch of litigation that NASDAQ having of the state versus based on what the federal government wants to be doing in California and a host of other states. But let's talk about California because that's your jurisdiction, let's say, or your prime jurisdiction. What impact has that had on what's happening on the ground in California?
- [35:54]
Erin Friday
Well, it has, first of all, lit a fire under parents who used to be more frightened to speak up, but they're speaking up and they're filing more lawsuits and they're calling school boards to task for socially transitioning their children. So we see a big shift on that level. We see at least parents now getting more in the news, seeing more in the news that they don't have to just transition their child if their child is suffering from gender confusion. So we see a lot of that. And, and it's a lot more fun. I mean, I have to admit it, I go to Sacramento, I've been going to Sacramento for four straight years, losing. And it's very fun to testify on some of the California bills and let them know that this is what's happening with the federal government. And it's not as simple as this, but I can pick up the phone and tell the federal government this is what's happening here in California and they're reacting.
- [37:06]
Janja Kellogg
Basically you have some leverage that you didn't have before.
- [37:10]
Erin Friday
Absolutely.
- [37:11]
Janja Kellogg
For a moment earlier you sounded like you weren't hopeful. I'm just. Because this sounds hopeful. You just told me. Right. But before you said I don't see the levels of this changing, you know. Right.
- [37:26]
Erin Friday
Well, there's been some reporting that the number of children saying or adolescents saying they're non binary has dropped and that the social contagion is at its peak and starting to come down. I don't see the number of kids saying they're trans identified dropping. The non binary is different because there were a lot of kids who took on that label because they wanted to be in the oppressed bucket. And so they really didn't have an issue with their sexual identity. They just wanted to be part of that club. And that club isn't as cool anymore. But they're still indoctrinating these young kids. And the children that fall prey to this, they're autistic, you know, they're already.
- [38:15]
Janja Kellogg
Or tend to be.
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Erin Friday
Right. I mean, but they fall into a bucket like I can truly have. And I have parents call me and all they have to do is tell me the sex of their child and their age of their child and I can pretty much tell their story because it's all the same. It's different for boys, it's different for girls.
- [38:34]
Janja Kellogg
Okay, so what is that story?
- [38:36]
Erin Friday
So for the girls. So if it's a young girl, it falls into a pattern. She has adhd, maybe autistic. Not a lot of friends into. Maybe into anime. Spends a lot of time on the Internet. So those are the girls. And as part of a friend group where the friends are also non binary, trans, whatever they are, or maybe lesbian. For the boys, the boys take on a different. Everything's binary really. The boys are different. Many, for many of the boys are. They have genius IQs, they have autism, usually Asperger's, which I don't know what the term they use now, but so they're very, very intelligent, never had a girlfriend, socially awkward, very into computers, very mathematically minded. They take on a different. And then we have the older females which tend to be the same sex attracted women who just want to go through life instead of being a masculine looking female, have shame and decide that they are actually a male because it's easier sometimes to go through life as a male than it is a female that has male attributes. So they all fall into different buckets. And there's certainly a pattern. And I actually had 150 parents write letters to the American Academy of Pediatrics trying to get them to stop their policy, at least take a look at it, do a systematic review. And what I didn't know, I had all the parents cc me on the emails that they sent to the aap and then I put together a chart of the stories of the parents to match them up. And the patterns are very clear. I mean, it's not scientific, but the patterns are really clear. Who got caught in the net. It's not the child who is playing sports and has a whole group of friends. And there's a pattern with respect to.
- [41:09]
Janja Kellogg
These lawsuits that involving the removals by child protective services. You said they're not necessarily going well, what do you think is going to happen with this space at this point?
- [41:24]
Erin Friday
Well, that's where I come in. So a group of attorneys and I have been working tirelessly on writing some legislation that will make it easier for parents to sue these child welfare agencies and the attorneys who represent their children and the social workers who are promoting this and unfairly investigating them. So we're hoping that this legislation will help in these lawsuits and then stop what is happening. We are also working to try to get the federal government to use its power through the HHS because the HHS funds close to 50% of all of these child protective services agencies. So the federal government has the power to say we are no longer going to fund you if you are taking children from otherwise fit parents, and which is really, really important. We are no longer going to fund the training that all these social workers are going through that trains them that parents like me are abusive. There's money going to training of judges in the same way. So the gender ideologues, they have been training judges for decades.
- [43:02]
Janja Kellogg
It sounds like this is sort of embedded in almost every aspect. I mean, this is the, this is why there's a pipeline, I guess, as you would. You would call it. Right.
- [43:10]
Erin Friday
Every institution has been invaded by gender ideology and we have to root it out.
- [43:19]
Janja Kellogg
And so a starting point for you is this kind of legislation?
- [43:24]
Erin Friday
Yes.
- [43:25]
Janja Kellogg
What's the name of your group?
- [43:27]
Erin Friday
Well, we're a coalition, but I'm the president of our duty and I'm Working with other attorneys in this space, a retired judge who worked in dependency and family court. So it's very nice to have an expert, but we're trying to figure out the easiest way and the quickest way, because I get a phone call a month from a parent saying that they're losing custody of their child because they won't transition them. I have parents that I tell them, run. Child protective services comes knocking on your door, and you live in a blue state. Get in your car and drive as quickly as you can to Florida, Texas, but do not remain in Oregon, Washington. You will not win. You will lose your child.
- [44:23]
Janja Kellogg
I mean, that's difficult to fathom. I mean, very difficult to fathom.
- [44:31]
Erin Friday
It's insane. This is the United States, and we have parents having to flee with their children. I even had a family flee to Poland. She asked, where can I go? And she said, I can go back to Poland. I said, go. You need to leave. You're not going to beat this behemoth. The courts are against you. They are. And it's not as if the judges are bad people. They are trained. They are trained also to follow just what the social worker says, follow what Child Protective services says. I mean, they're going through hundreds of cases. The recommendation is. I mean, can I read the recommendation?
- [45:17]
Janja Kellogg
Sure, yeah.
- [45:19]
Erin Friday
This is from an actual case in Colorado. This is the recommendation for child Protective services to these parents of a child who thinks that she is a boy. The requirement is that the parent and family will be affirming of the child's chosen gender identity. Forced transition. The parent will not make any negative comments regarding the child's gender expression about her wearing, but they use his male clothing. The parent will allow the child to go to a friend's house if he feels he needs to need space from home. The parent and child will attend family therapy to better understand and navigate the child's transition. And the parent will visit the Rainbow Youth center to educate, to be educated about the minor's gender transition and get resources for the minor.
- [46:30]
Janja Kellogg
What is the Rainbow Youth Center?
- [46:33]
Erin Friday
Well, these are these nonprofits we talk about. You know, the nonprofit in Minnesota with all the. With all the childcare. Well, there's all these nonprofits in the United States that push gender ideology, and they're, again, being funded by the federal government and by state government, and these are indoctrination centers, and they are there to teach the parent that you are bad unless you transition your child. So this is our government telling the parents, you must transition your child or you may not get your child back. This is real. This is, you know, Colorado. I have one from Oregon, I have one from, you know, California. I can get them from every state. This is what they write.
- [47:23]
Janja Kellogg
Fascinating. What does our duty do?
- [47:26]
Erin Friday
It's a really good question. We are a jack of all trades. We look at ourselves as connectors. So we are not a parent support group. So when a parent wants to talk about their feelings and their distress, we send them elsewhere, we connect them with attorneys, we help get them into advocacy, teach them how to testify in their state against state legislation, what letters to write, how to safeguard their children, what to say to school boards. We write amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in various districts to give voice to the parents stories. So we do a lot. We also have what I would call an underground railroad of therapists that we met out to these parents who are looking for non affirming therapists.
- [48:30]
Janja Kellogg
Well, and just so there's just something implicit here to what you said. We didn't really discuss this as so much in this interview I have in the past, but there's just some significant portion of therapists, child therapists will just affirm as part of their training, right?
- [48:48]
Erin Friday
Correct, correct. And there's a large portion of therapists depending on what state they live in, where the law tells them that they must affirm. And so there are therapists who won't do that, but then they won't take on these clients because they're afraid they're going to lose their license. And we have a Supreme Court case going on right now that will determine whether these so called anti conversion therapy laws are legal or not. So in Colorado, California, a bunch of liberal states, therapists are only allowed to affirm a child's gender identity. They're not allowed to question it.
- [49:34]
Janja Kellogg
So basically our duty is a one stop shop. If you're in any way kind of intersecting into this gender ideology, gender medicine field and you need help, you guys will find the right person for you if it's not you.
- [49:49]
Erin Friday
That's correct.
- [49:50]
Janja Kellogg
Okay. How do people find you?
- [49:52]
Erin Friday
It's rdutyusa.org is our website.
- [49:57]
Janja Kellogg
Fantastic. So incredible conversation here. A final thought as we finish.
- [50:02]
Erin Friday
Well, I'm very hopeful now that I sit in D.C. that the White House and that Congress is going to continue to safeguard children and look at parents like us, like me, as the best parents and help support us because we need them and stop forgetting about the blue states. Blue states need help and the only help that we're going to get is from the federal government.
- [50:32]
Janja Kellogg
Well, Erin, Friday it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
- [50:34]
Erin Friday
Thank you so much.
- [50:36]
Janja Kellogg
Thank you all for joining Aaron, Friday and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janje Kellogg.