Over the past several years, it seems like the transgender movement came out of nowhere. Almost overnight, the commonly accepted definition of “gender” went from male and female to however one chooses to identify on a particular day. Part of the reason for this rapid change was the strategy that transgender proponents utilized, many of which are noticeably similar to the tactics used by cult-like organizations.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Maria Keffler, author of the book Desist, Detrans & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult and co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children, to discuss how to protect your children from the cult-like tactics that the transgender movement has utilized.
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Family Policy Matters
Protecting Your Child from the “Gender Cult”: Part 1 (with Maria Keffler)
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Today, we are joined by Maria Keffler, author of two important books for parents, Desist, Detrans, Detox: Getting Your Children Out of the Gender Cult, and her new book, Time Tested Parenting: Raising Healthy Children in a Hostile World. Maria Keffler is a co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children and the Arlington Parent Coalition in Virginia. Maria Keffler, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
MARIA KEFFLER: Thank you. It’s so good to be here with you, Traci.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, so these are not the most comfortable topics. So, what experiences as a teacher and a parent motivated you to get into these highly controversial subjects?
MARIA KEFFLER: Yeah, this is not what I expected to be doing with this part of my life, but I began seeing so many kids getting sucked into this thought that they are not the sex that their body says they are. But what really pulled me into it was in 2018 or 2019 a friend of mine called me. We both had kids in the Arlington Public School system here in Virginia, and she said, Maria, I was looking around for summer school information on the school website, and I stumbled across this transgender students policy working group meeting. It’s tonight. I really feel like I should go. Would you come with me? We’re both educators. We were not working in the Arlington system at the time, but we both have an education background. So, we went to this meeting and listened to this group of a dozen or so students, parents, I don’t think there were any teachers at the table, but administrators, sitting around talking about what they wanted to see as far as policies around transgender students. And the big takeaway for us from that evening was their desire to keep things from parents. Parents were seen as the abusers, as untrustworthy, and at one point, the head of counseling for the school district said that evening, if parents aren’t there yet, we need to help them along. And I thought that was the most arrogant thing I’d ever heard an educator say that the school district knows better than parents what’s good for their own children. And as I saw again, more and more of my friends kids adopting these identities, it really horrified me. I started digging into it, and what I found just frightened me. And I said, I’ve got to get involved.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. This attitude by the school system that you found. How pervasive do you think that is? Could we see that in our own hometowns? Do you think?
MARIA KEFFLER: Well, I think it’s everywhere. This is coming down from the federal level. It’s coming down from the Department of Education. It’s coming down from the NEA, which is the National Education Association, that’s the largest teachers’ union in the country. So, it is everywhere. If you are in a public school, it is there. If you’re in a private school, it may be there. It’s really ubiquitous. And the attitude that these educators have now is this savior complex, because they’re told you might be the only safe adult in that child’s life. That’s a really heady thought, right, to think, Oh, I could save a child from this abusive home life, and that is the message that’s being taught to educators now that kids parents are not trustworthy, we need to protect them from these homophobic, transphobic, whatever, conservative parents. So, it is. It’s a very widespread phenomenon, and I do want to say there are good teachers out there, but they’re being silenced, they’re being fired, they’re being kept from making policy decisions around this issue.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. So we do know that there has been a turning point. We are starting to see the true science of this actually prevail. Are you seeing that this is also the attitude that’s pervading these national teacher organizations, or do they continue to pound the old message?
MARIA KEFFLER: Here in the United States, the trans rights lobby, which includes a lot of medical organizations, mental health organizations, education, it’s really full steam ahead. They are continuing to fight for the right to trans children, to sideline parents who don’t want their kids to be medicalized. And the reason is, it’s a very profitable industry. If you do a Google search for sex reassignment surgery market report, you will find multiple market reports, which are reports written up by companies that help businesses exploit certain trends. And so they’ve done multiple market reports, just sex reassignment surgery, that’s not even cross sex hormones or puberty blockers, that is predicted to be a multi-billion-dollar industry in the next few years. That’s not a natural phenomenon. That’s not something that just happens by accident. It’s being driven because it’s very profitable.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, in addition to the whole follow the money, which, of course, we’re always told to do when we’re looking at a trend like this, you’ve also called it a cult. So, does it run deeper than the money then?
MARIA KEFFLER: It really does. They have, I mean, by they, I mean the trans rights activism machine, has created a cult around this. And I know that sounds hyperbolic. It sounds a little sensational, but it’s really not, when you look into it. Cults do eight things reliably. If you look at a cult, which is a destructive ideology that coalesces around a specific idea or person, cults do eight things, and trans hits, every single one of them. Love bombing. That is a very ubiquitous technique that cults use to draw in recruits. We’ve talked to so many kids, many of whom are on the autism spectrum, because numbers are putting kids who say they’re trans like 65-70% may be autistic. And there’s some specific reasons why autistic kids are vulnerable to this message. But we talked to kids who have been in and come out of it, and they’ll say, you know, I didn’t have very many friends when I was in school, but when I said I thought I was trans, suddenly I was celebrated. Everybody came and told me how amazing I was, how fantastic I was. That’s a cult technique, because we all want to be accepted and loved and told that we’re good people, and that’s one of the things that happens in GSA clubs in schools, the Gender Sexuality Allies clubs, is they love bomb people. And then the renunciation of family relationships. That’s another of the eight things that cults do. They try to separate you from the people in your life who would have your best interests at heart. Your family, your friends, who might say, Hey, I don’t know if this thing you’re doing is really healthy. The cult wants to cut that off, and that’s absolutely what happens. As soon as you say, I think I’m trans, the kids immediately get the message if you tell your parents, they’re going to throw you out, they’re going to hate you, they’re going to abuse you, we’ll protect you. And again, you get those teachers and educators and therapists who think, I’m going to be the savior of this person. And so they try to cut off your loyalty from your primary family of origin and get the loyalty to the cult. There are eight things like that. I don’t want to take the time to go through all of them, but trans hits every single one of them, and it’s been manufactured. It has been created because it is so profitable.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: We have a lot, as you mentioned, teachers, administrators, counselors, that are buying into this, but I think many of them certainly aren’t part of the cult, as you’ve called it. So are they just being duped. Why are they participating in this?
MARIA KEFFLER: That’s a really good question. I often tell people, there are deceivers and then there are the deceived. So, at the high level of this, I really believe this was created and manufactured as a deception in order to make money and further some political agendas. But by and large, the vast majority of people have just gotten sucked in, because this is what they’re taught in trainings. I had people who were just doing substitute training who have sent me the materials and said 90% of the sub training was about LGBTQ. When they talk about abuse, they’re not even talking about anything except LGBTQ, and so people are getting this training, and they’re like, well, this is what the experts say. Families who have a child who says, I’m trans, I’m non binary, they talk to the pediatrician who has just read the policy that the American Pediatric Association has put out, saying best practice is to affirm. Why is that the policy? Because a 37-doctor board put the policy together for the rest of the doctors in the association, the other 599,933 had no input to that. And the two main writers of that policy are doctors who have ties to gender clinics. So, it makes them no money to say, let’s wait. Let’s not medicalize. They’re trying to medicalize. So you go to training, and you get this training, and unless you’re really thinking about it, you just do what you’re told. You go with the flow. And there’s so much pressure to accept it. One therapist was going through some training, and she reached out to our organization. She said, I’m a trained therapist. I went back to school for an extra certification, and I’m seeing all of these trans policies. And I raised my hand and asked a question, like, hey, how does this not conflict with, and I think she brought up that therapists are not supposed to introduce ideas to the client. They’re supposed to just help the client think through things. She was silenced. So many people have been bullied into it or just lulled into it, because this is the kind thing to do, but it really isn’t. It’s really destructive.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. And do you think parents are being deceived as well and welcoming this in their children’s lives sometimes?
MARIA KEFFLER: Absolutely. When a parent goes to any of those experts, what they hear is best practice is to affirm. What they hear is, do you want a live son or a dead daughter or the vice versa? That’s emotional manipulation. That’s preying on a parent’s worst fears that my child may commit suicide. There’s no data, by the way, to back that up. In fact, we’re starting to find data that refutes that. There’s nothing to say that a child’s going to commit suicide if you don’t affirm their transition. But parents are strong armed into accepting this. There’s so many nefarious things about this, but one of the nefarious parts of it is once parents affirm and their child gets put on that treatment path, parents are going to be very reluctant to ever admit that they were wrong, because if they do, they have to deal with the fact that they were culpable for contributing to their own child’s destruction. That’s an awful thing. It’s hard for these kids when they’ve been in this for 2, 3, 5 years to go, Oh, I just insisted everybody in my life call me he. Now I realize I was wrong. We see this all the time. Detransitioners saying, How do I admit that I was wrong? Well, as a parent, if you were party to that affirmation that medicalized your child and damaged his or her body, how hard it is to say, oh my gosh, I was wrong. I wish I hadn’t done this.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: What do you tell parents? What if they live in one of these counties or states where the counselors all agree that the parents can’t be trusted to make good decisions for their children, and your child comes home and says that they have been transitioning or would like to transition. What kind of advice do you give parents in that situation?
MARIA KEFFLER: We recommend deprogramming, which is what my book Desist, Detrans, and Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult is about. It walks you through a path of, how do you deprogram someone who’s been programmed in a cult. But best practices for preventing this are, unfortunately, no public school. If you can get your child out of the public school, do so. We pulled our kids in 2019 and started homeschooling. And I know that’s hard, and not everybody can do that, but find a school where this will not be pushed. No smartphones, because that child now has access to everything and everyone in the world who’s trying to come for that child for a variety of reasons. And social media, it is not a safe place. Those are the three vectors where trans is being transmitted, public school, social media, smartphones. If your child has gotten sucked in, you’ve got a long, hard row to hoe, but parents are getting their kids back. There is a way back, but you’ve got a work deprogramming program.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You know, I feel like we’ve spent this entire interview talking about your first book, and you have a second book. Would you be willing to come back and talk to us for an entire program about your second book.
MARIA KEFFLER: Oh, I’d be delighted to it’s a much happier book.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Yeah. And of course, it’s called Time Tested Parenting: Raising Healthy Children in a Hostile World. But in the meantime, where can parents go to learn more about your first book, Desist, Detrans, Detox?
MARIA KEFFLER: That is published by Sophia Institute Press. So, you can go to Sophia and see it. You can also come to our website, which is AdvocatesProtectingChildren.org, and it’s available both places.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Maria Keffler, thank you so much for being with us on Family Policy Matters.
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