WASHINGTON, D.C. — Education Secretary Linda McMahon met with a group of detransitioners Wednesday to discuss how schools, teachers, administrators, and others play a major role in pushing young, vulnerable students toward irreversible gender transition procedures.
McMahon met with the detransitioners at the Department of Education headquarters in recognition of DeTrans Awareness Day to talk about the pervasiveness of gender ideology, how America’s schools are often a breeding ground for coaxing children into believing they are a different gender than they really are, and what the department can do about it.
“We were honored yesterday to welcome this group to the Department of Education. I commend the young people in attendance for bravely sharing their experiences — and the medical and mental health professionals and parents for their advocacy,” McMahon told The Federalist. “No teacher should attempt to persuade or coerce a student to undergo a gender transition. No parent should be lied to or prevented from knowing what is going on with their child’s mental or physical health. We stand firmly alongside parents, professionals, advocates, and especially detransitioners, who understand firsthand the damage caused by indoctrinating kids to believe that they can ever be ‘born in the wrong body.’”
Because of the recent increase in both identifying as a gender other than one’s biological sex and the pursuit of medical interventions to supposedly “affirm” that ideation, the group that met with McMahon represent an early wave of what is likely to be a much larger phenomenon of detransitioning.
Members of the group shared with McMahon and other Education Department officials harrowing stories of how they were pushed toward social and medical transition as children by school staff, clubs, social media, and doctors, and how almost none of the adults in their lives attempted to stop it. They also spoke about how the interventions they received as young children have affected their lives.
Image CreditBreccan F. Thies / The Federalist
Some detransitioners who spoke with McMahon have now made it their mission to ensure what happened to them does not happen to any other children through involvement in advocacy, academia, and even becoming teachers themselves.
‘Patient Zero’: The Power Of ‘Social Transition’
Before medical transition becomes part of the discussion, children are often socially transitioned first. That process involves treating a child like the gender they claim to identify as, calling them a different name and pronouns according to that identification, and allowing them to use private facilities like restrooms and locker rooms in accordance to their identified gender.
That, many at the meeting said, is often where schools have the most influence.
As The Federalist reported, dozens of school districts in Maine alone have policies that actively hide critical medical information from parents, such as if their child begins identifying as another gender in school. Many school districts also allow students to use sex-separate facilities of their choice and coerce students and teachers into using “preferred pronouns” and names.
Those policies exist across the country.
While hiding information from parents and allowing students to use opposite facilities is a massive problem, the social transition process is actually much worse.
“Social transition — changing names, pronouns, school records — it seems harmless, but it often initiates a trajectory that is challenging to stop once begun,” Claire Abernathy, 20, who was put on testosterone to transition to a boy after her 14th birthday, said. “My school affirmed this identity without informing my parents, they started calling me a new name and pronouns, and letting me use the boys’ bathroom and locker rooms, and this immediate affirmation led me swiftly into medicalization.”
She said she wants to be an elementary school teacher.
Abernathy, who started identifying as a boy following a sexual assault at the age of 12, said after six months of taking testosterone she underwent a double mastectomy — something she described as “a child making irreversible decisions” against the backdrop of the reality that “trusted adults in my life had guided me towards these irreversible interventions.”
“Other children and teens are being led down this same path, being told that transition is the only answer for them,” she warned. “They’re too young to understand the consequences. They’re not mature enough.”
Abernathy, along with fellow detransitioners Elle Palmer, 25, and Simon Amaya Price, 20, all referred to themselves as “patient zero” for their schools, meaning they were the first to identify as transgender. That identity came with special treatment from teachers and staff, and also brought about a wave of other students suddenly saying they were transgender, too — a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “social contagion.”
“Once I started going, the school was pretty much instantly affirming, and I was their first trans student so they really wanted to ‘do it right,’” Palmer said sarcastically. “So I was basically educating them on how I wanted to be treated, and they kind of let me have the reins.”
Palmer said she had dropped out of school by the age of 13, began identifying as “nonbinary” by the age of 14, and finally decided that she was a boy by 15. Ultimately, her parents allowed her to start taking testosterone in a deal to get her to go back to school.
“Shortly after I started attending and started making friends, two of my female friends came out as trans after they met me,” she said. “By next year that I graduated, I had doubled or tripled the amount of trans friends that I had.”
Image CreditBreccan F. Thies / The Federalist
She said that prior to going back to school, much of her indoctrination into believing she was a boy came from social media and the internet.
“I was incredibly isolated and living most of my life online. You can kind of start to imagine yourself as a boy, because you’re using ‘he/him’ pronouns online — nobody knows any different,” Palmer explained. “You’re introducing yourself as ‘Luke,’ telling everyone that you’re a boy, nobody’s questioning you, they don’t see pictures of you, they don’t hear your voice. So I started to live out this identity, thinking I was really a boy.”
Autism And The K-12-To-College Transition Pipeline
The number of autistic people who identify as transgender is shockingly high, with some estimates saying they are six times more likely to identify as something other than their sex.
Perhaps that is because autism can lead one to fixate or obsess over an idea, and with all the social pressure pushing people toward transition, the idea that one is stuck in the wrong body can be persistent and agonizing.
Whatever the reason, autistic children are more vulnerable than average children to gender ideology, as Laura Becker, 28, a detransitioner and advocate with diagnosed autism, explained.
“All I really needed was a safe adult in the room to protect me. I was autistic. I was even more vulnerable than the average kid, and no one was helping: No teachers, no professors, no school staff, no school counselor,” Becker said. “My issues were very overt: I was cutting myself, I wasn’t showering, I was an overtly very depressed, socially awkward child in this environment, and no one was advocating for me.”
Instead of getting help from the adults around her, Becker, who was abused as a child, started “self-medicating with substances” at the age of 14 and discovered gender ideology online. Her new identity was then “affirmed” by her high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and teaching staff.
That “affirmation” at a young age followed her to college, where Becker was again “affirmed” by her sociology of sexuality professor, who herself had pursued a transition from female to male. That professor told Becker where she could find hormone treatments for free, and an “informed consent” clinic provided her with the drugs “on the first meeting.”
“I ended up having a mental breakdown from testosterone, and at the age of 20, I had my breasts cut off,” Becker said. “I was actually suicidal the day of the surgery, but the surgeon went ahead anyway. Obviously, I was not of sound mind to consent.”
By the time of her double mastectomy, Becker was 20. But, as she attested, the damage had already been done from the “affirmation” as a child.
Becker is now a life coach primarily for parents with autistic children, and she said that she’s concerned that they can be indoctrinated at a young age, only for any legal barriers to “transition” — which are few in many states anyway — to disappear at the age of 18.
“I’m sitting there as someone who has to wear a mastectomy bra for the rest of my life. I see these kids, and all the artsy ones, all the quirky ones, all the ones that are sad and lonely, and they’re drawing in their notebooks and writing sad poetry — what I was doing — they’re the ones that are going to have their breasts cut off. They’re the ones that, even if they don’t get transitioned as a minor, they’re going to be affirmed in college,” she said. “My highest concern, is getting indoctrinated, not only in the K-12 system, but then reaffirmed and mutilated once they hit that vulnerable 18 to 25 demographic.”
Price, who is also autistic, said after the meeting that “just because you turn 18 doesn’t mean you’re any more able to consent … you spend your entirety of high school being affirmed by your teachers, by the guidance counselors, by your classmates.”
‘We Want To End Medical Kidnapping’
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also sent a representative to the meeting in order to discuss both what HHS is doing on the transgender issue from a medical perspective, and areas where HHS and the Department of Education can work together to solve many of the overlapping problems.
Andrew Guernsey, senior advisor to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., told the group that solving the issue, which many believe is medical malpractice, is a “top priority for the administration.”
He said that HHS will be coming out with a whistleblower portal, not unlike the one the Education Department created to report DEI discrimination, to help “identify where the previous administration embedded so many of these problems,” including in curriculum materials and in school health clinics. One parent was concerned that hospitals are changing billing codes to hide transitions from federal oversight, and many of the detransitioners said their procedures were billed as things like “endocrine disorder” rather than what they really were. Guernsey said that HHS is creating a system for people to report when hospitals are active in the “mutilation of kids” and defrauding the federal government.
One of the issues that was pointed out by some parents in the room is organizations like the Trevor Project, homeless shelters, and foster care facilities have received federal dollars while simultaneously advancing the transitions of purportedly homeless children without parental consent. Some of these children are not homeless, but have run away from their homes and are being held by the state and given access to transition interventions in state custody, often when parents will not allow children to transition.
To that, Guernsey simply said, “We want to end medical kidnapping.”
Guernsey pointed to other administration efforts, like the Center for Medicaid Services sending a notice to all hospitals that the Trump administration believes “the evidence for these irreversible procedures on children is incredibly weak, and that hospitals should re-evaluate their procedures, their policies, in light of the evidence and putting them on notice that further action is coming from the department.”
President Donald Trump also issued executive orders on the subject, including “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”
The latter order directs HHS to conduct a “review of the existing literature” on transition procedures that will be published in the coming weeks.
Guernsey said he expects the conclusions to be “unambiguous.”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
