Our Child First—Then Yours | Todd & Krista Kolstad | EP 428

Hello everyone. I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle With God." I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye.

The location that our daughter worked had called and asked if our son could come in to work, and it all took off from there. There was nothing in the middle, complete trust, and all of a sudden we find out that she had created this world where she works, where she's known as a boy. [Music]

So hi everybody, I'm here with Todd and Christa Colad today, and they are a couple from Northeast Montana who've had the misfortune to have their sleeves caught in the Child Protection Services maelstrom. Their daughter started making claims of variant gender identity in 2021 and then got tangled in online interactions that led to the arrival of Child Protection Services at the doorstep of the Colads. To say things went downhill from there is an understatement. I'd highly recommend that you watch this podcast, especially if you regard yourself, let's say, and your family as sort of typical middle-class Americans trying to live a quiet and normal life because you need to know what might happen to people who are complacent enough to imagine that such a thing is possible under the circumstances that obtain today. This is a cautionary tale, and it's a rough one. So join us and go down the rabbit hole of state-mandated gender-affirming care.

Well, thank you for flying here and talking to me today. I presume we're going to have a difficult conversation.

We are. Yes, I imagine so.

So we'll start really at the beginning. You have five children, Todd?

Todd: Yes, five children.

Okay. And how long have you guys been married?

Christa: Um, we've been married seven years. Yes, together about...

Okay. Now how are your children doing in general?

Christa: Our oldest daughter is in Canada. She moved away when she was over the age of 18. We have a daughter that's in the Kalispell area, a daughter that's in the Navy that's a medic; she does fantastic in what she does. Then we have a son that's in Canada that has been with his mother the whole time. They've had a lot of problems, I think. Hopefully, he's on track now. And then we have our daughter, Jennifer, who has been with me her whole life. Every day I went to work, I took her with me, took her to breakfast every day of her life for the first few years she was in school. That kind of relationship took her four-wheeling, you know, out seeing nature, and probably a super close relationship because of that.

Okay, now Jennifer's the daughter where difficulties emerged in 2021? You were around then?

Christa: Yes, I was.

Okay, and so what was your view of what was going on with Jennifer in 2021?

Christa: So in 2021, she was just 12 years old. She had come into puberty and had struggled with bullying and stuff since about second grade. So in 2021, people from the church started saying to us, "Your daughter is saying that she wants to be called Leo and be referred to as a boy, and she's saying that she's your son while she's at church." So we sat down with her and we said, "Hey, you know, what is this about? What's going on here?" She said, "Well, I think I want to be a boy." We were like, "Okay, so we had a conversation with her, and Todd did too. You know, we had a family conversation about why do you feel this way? Do you think it's because you've always been bullied? Do you think it's because you're not in contact with your birth mom?" As a girl, that would probably be very heartbreaking, you know, the person that loves you the most didn't want anything to do with you. So we talked about trauma and losses and things like that, and I suggested that we go to counseling to explore this with a counselor because she's not going to listen to her parents, you know how it is with younger kids.

Anyway, I knew she was going to take our advice, so we put her in counseling and we thought we were in a different place. So we really didn't have any more issues with her saying that she wanted to be transgender until the day when all of this kicked off.

Yes, okay. So, well, let's delve into that a little bit. Todd, you said that you spent a lot of time with Jennifer her whole life, okay? You both pointed out that she was bullied in school from a young age. Did she have friends at school, or was she very isolated?

Christa: Very few friends.

And did you have any sense of what it was that attracted the attention of the bullies?

Todd: Yes, kind of. Because prior to moving back to where we live now, the problem started at 12, and it was mostly lying, crazy lies. The school, we met with their counselors there and they said what the kids are doing to be mean is wrong, but she's bringing some of this on herself with her actions, so she's partly accountable too. Where we live now, the school is fantastic. The principal, the staff is just fantastic, and so she would come home and we'd find out that kids had told her to kill herself, and the school would require them to write a note apologizing—the school apologized, and that's how she was treated. But we would check her status every single day and find out how every single day went with her. We were proactive with the school, and things were really good for the most part in her life other than...

Well, so what do you think was going on with regards to the story she was telling you? You made some mention of lying at school, and what do you think was happening there?

Christa: It's strange. We wanted that diagnosed; it wouldn't just be lying. It would be lying about good things and bad things. We didn't know where it would come from, so our only rule with her was you have to tell the truth, and we'd explain to her the importance of telling the truth. So from the point of how we got here, there were never issues of transgender. There haven't been issues of any of that; it's been lying, you know, that kind of thing. I think with school, you know, just as a girl, I can say she's always been super smart, always straight A's, off-the-chart smarts. I asked them, do you think she could be on the spectrum somewhere? We're looking at some things going on there, but I've never got a diagnosis. She's very, very creative.

Do you see the reason I'm asking about that? Well, partly it's about the lies. I'm curious about that with regards to like an active fantasy life, let's say. But it's also the case that I believe the kids who are more likely to be attracted by these gender-fluid ideologies are likely to be creative open kids who have in some way more fluid identity because they're creative. You also portrayed your daughter at school as a bit of an outsider, and one of the attractions of this gender ideology is that it gives kids who are outsiders and who are uncertain about their identity a way of being, and also a way of being outstanding and recognized for something new.

Now, the school that she was at in 2021, is that the school you were referring to where you believe they are doing a good job?

Todd: Yes.

So where do you think she picked up these ideas about gender transition?

Christa: Oh, that's easy. TikTok is one. I think there are predators on there that lead kids who are more of the outsiders into a specific direction; that's a big one. Then there are other kids already in that boat who are also seduced by those kinds of things, so to speak. She or the church was telling us that she's running with a lot of those kinds of kids is what we're being told.

Well, we had measures in place. She just didn't have free reign of the internet; we had apps that controlled where she could go and stuff. But when she left our house, I know she was going to friends' houses who don't have those measures in place, so she's getting access to social media. Even though it's not in our house, she's still getting access to it.

Right, and these friends, did you have any sense of who they were, what they were like?

Todd: We met some of them. We tried to help them. They were kids. One of them would walk to a town 15 miles away in the winter without a coat, and we gave him a coat. We tried to monitor that and monitor how her activities were with them, and it’s a very tough balancing line once they hit 12.

Well, the thing is, kids of that age are trying to, the task of a child that age really is to stop being a child and to start associating with their peers, right? And so part of the reason that teenage children are so susceptible to peer pressure is because their job at that age is to become socialized into the world of their peers.

And that helps them make the transition from being a dependent child to an independent adult. Right? You go from your parents to your friends, with your parents in the background, and then hopefully you get through your friends in some ways so that you can become independent and then establish your own family. So the susceptibility of teenagers to peer pressure is not only normative but also, in some ways, desirable. But the problem is, of course, that it can go very sideways if the peer group is prone to the sorts of behaviors that won't lead them into a productive and enjoyable adulthood.

So, yeah, so that's a rough situation. And you said you tried to monitor her social media use, but there's a limit to how much you can do about that too. Not partly because for all the dangers that are inherent to smartphones and technology, children still have to learn to master it, and so you can it's not easy to figure out how to have your teenagers be experts in an electronic world without being exposed to all the catastrophes that come along with it.

Okay, so now you said that first of all, your church alerted you to the fact that she was toying with a male identity, correct?

And you thought, did you see any changes in the way she was presenting herself?

Todd: She's always been a tomboy. My husband owns a tech company, so she's never been into girly things. She's always been interested in computers and robots and things like that. She's never been a "girl."

I see. Oh, I see. And so she had, so one of the biggest differences between men and women, masculine and feminine temperaments, let's say, is that men are more reliably interested in things and women are more reliably interested in people. But she sounds like she had at least to some degree more male pattern interests.

Now, that's not completely unheard of among women, obviously. So the mere fact that that occurs doesn't mean that you're born in the wrong body, let's say. But you said she was smart, and she's creative, and she was interested in, what exactly, you said robots and electronics?

With my husband owning a computer company, her and a bunch of the techs all kind of raised their children together, and they would take turns taking them to school and stuff. So there were about three or four little girls, and their interests were computers and what their dads were doing and taking apart the computer and learning about the computer.

So again, with her being super smart, even with us putting measures in place to try and limit her internet activity, a super smart kid would figure out a way around it, you know? So we're always trying to have to kind of get around that.

Right. Okay, so now you did sit down with her, and you had a conversation about what you had heard at church, and what did she tell you?

Christa: She started crying. She was very, very upset and very emotional, and she said, "I just don't know what to do. Nobody likes me." So she came back to nobody really likes me. "I don't really have any friends, so maybe if I'm something different, this will help me."

Yeah. Well, I interviewed this woman, Chloe Cole.

I've heard of her.

Yeah. Well, Chloe is a detransitioner and now an activist trying to stop the early surgical transition, mutilation, and sterilization of children. She had both her breasts removed when she was, I think she was 15—something absolutely awful. And she said to me a couple of things that I thought were interesting. The first thing she said is when she was about 12, or 11 or 12, she realized or assumed that when she did finish her journey through puberty, that she would have a rather boyish figure, and she had fantasized about being built like Kim Kardashian, you know, extremely curvy. And she thought that it's not going to go that way, and I won't make a very good woman, and so maybe I would make a better boy, which is I suppose something that's within the realm of fantasy for young women who are battling with the complexities of puberty.

But nobody ever told her. You know, none of the counselors she ever talked to, none of the psychologists, so-called, or the physicians, never told her that that kind of discomfort with that bodily discomfort is very, very, very common, normative even among 12- or 13-year-old girls, and that virtually everybody grows out of it. And the suffering that goes... See the other thing happens to girls too when they hit puberty is their levels of negative emotion go up, and so that can also confuse them. And your daughter was additionally suffering from the fact, and this is a real problem, of her unpopularity, right?

And so she's going to be casting around looking for a way of being as a teenager that's going to pull her into the social group, right? And so I was just going to say she always wants... she's always wanted to be like the pretty ultra-popular girl. And I get it; I'm a girl too. Like, who doesn't want that when they're a kid? But instead, she's always been like the kid in math club and the kid who goes to math competitions and wins and the kid who, you know, super smart.

So she's always struggled with that.

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She'd probably do fine once she got to university.

Yeah, right.

Because then she's going to be able to find a niche where those skills and abilities, there'll be people around her that she'll be able to fit right in with. And it's also at that time later where that kind of intelligence, mathematical ability, and interest is really going to pay off. But that's not necessarily the case in junior high school, for example.

Okay, so you talk to her, and she's upset. She's crying, and she's telling you that she's sick of being unpopular and so forth, and you take her to a counselor.

Okay, and so, or you set her up with a counselor. And what sort of counselor was that? What were his qualifications?

Christa: He was the director of the youth group who has some counseling credentials, and so we asked him if he would start meeting with her weekly before youth group and talking to her.

Okay. And what was the consequence of that?

Christa: Everything was really positive during that whole time. But what came out later, she said they put a gun to her head, which was again one of the crazy lies, and she meant it literally. So it was mixed and so, but there was a counselor with someone you trusted, and you don't believe that the counselor was someone who tilted her farther down this road?

Not at all. I don't think he did at all.

So you had the conversation with her, and then you thought things were essentially going okay. Was she still complaining at that time about not being popular at school?

Christa: She was.

And what grade was she in at that point?

Todd: Seventh.

Yeah, that's a rough grade.

Christa: Yeah, it started in seventh grade.

So she sees the counselor for about how long?

Christa: About six or eight months.

Weekly?

Yes.

And did you see any changes in her behavior?

Christa: It's so hard to analyze. I drove her to school or to the bus, whichever she wanted; just a best friend relationship. I took her to school, picked her up. Her life was happy. If something did bad happen, she would let me know it right away, and she was in a hurry to do her kid things. Get on her electronics or go see her friends, and she had a summer job. Life, so you felt that things were good and you believed that the communication channels were open?

Yes.

And you're watching this.

Todd: I mean they have a very close relationship; you're watching this. What do you think of the relationship between these two?

Christa: You know what? They're very close. She's also very close to me because I'm the only mother figure she's ever known. So she actually calls me "Mom," even though I'm her stepmom, and so we were very, very close with her and very open communication definitely.

Okay, but again you have to remember we also have a child that has behavioral problems and has some other attention-seeking behaviors and stuff like that. So even though we were close to her and monitoring her and keeping an eye on her, she still kind of has this other life over here where she, I don't want to say gets in trouble, but she makes up stories and she does things that come back to our life over here.

Well, that's tricky too. Because, you know, you don't want you actually don't want your children in some ways to share absolutely everything with you when they're teenagers, right? Because they should be parceling off a part of their life that's private.

Yeah, I don't mean hidden exactly or secret. That isn't what I mean, but because they're starting to mature, they should have a right to privacy and their right to explore in that private domain. I mean, one of the things we do know about the pathway of childhood development is there are some children who act out all the time, let's say. And they often stay in trouble and get in more trouble as they get older. And then there's children who never do anything wrong at all, and they also get in trouble as they get older. They're more likely to be dependent and depressed and anxious. Then there's kids in the middle who, you know, will experiment and cause a certain amount of trouble and trying to see where the limits are as teenagers.

And that does imply that they parse off a bit of a private life. But as far as you guys were concerned, after you had that initial conversation, while she was undergoing this counseling, things were no worse than they usually were at least, and some of the signs were good. She had activities; she was going to school; she had a job; she had some interests; and she was still communicating with both of you?

Absolutely.

Okay, what about her siblings? Were any of her siblings around at that time as well?

Christa: She's the last one in the house, and so three of the older girls are kind of busy with their lives, and they call maybe once a week or so. She hasn't spoken to her brother who's been with a birth mom in probably seven or eight years; they just don't have phone contact.

Okay, okay. So in some ways, in your household at this time, she was in the position of only child there, correct?

Correct.

Okay, so now, all right, so you're going along, and there's some problems, but they don't sound like they're completely out of the ordinary for, you know, a 13-year-old girl with some trouble socializing. And so what’s the next event?

Todd: Well, two things. What do you think’s happening at school? Was your school a woke school? Was it a reasonable school? Was it still the case that you think that most of the exposure she had to this gender ideology was online? Did the school play a role in this?

Christa: The school played absolutely no role in that. Yeah, we live in a very, very small area. So I often tell people if you Google "middle of nowhere United States," that town that comes up, Glasgow, Montana, that's where we live. And so they're not very woke out there at all.

And so the school, if she had demanded to be called by other names or other pronouns, they would have shut it down immediately. They wouldn’t have done that.

Okay, so this as far as you're concerned was something that was mostly occurring as a consequence of her particular peer group she was associating with and also information that she was obtaining online. And you mentioned TikTok in particular. Was there a reason for that specific mention?

Yes, because we had seen a couple of times where we were just blown away because life was perfect at home; relationship was perfect. And then we would see crazy posts online or through email, and then some of the applications that she would go to on her computer. These were some of the things she was posting.

And what sort of things was she posting?

Christa: Well, one time we were in, for example, we were in Kisel. She was in Glasgow, and she posted she was in some kind of game and that her parents would beat her ass, was her words. None of that—we were shocked when we saw that on her phone, and she said, "I don't know why I do this. I don't know why I see."

So that was another manifestation of those fantastical fantasies and lies.

Yes, right. So she's toying with being a different person online. So that's the weird—one of the weird things about the online world, is because you can be any—you can be anything you want online, right? Because there's no one there watching you, and so any story you tell, you can get away with any story you tell. And you can also monitor the impact of that story, right?

And if you're desperately seeking attention, then if you come up with a fantastical story that buys you a lot of sympathy, let's say, then that's an easy road to walk down. So, you know, I've seen other teenage girls get in trouble in exactly this way.

Do you know, and this is a very personal question, and you're not obliged to answer it, do you know if she was posting—do you know if any of the interactions she had online had any sexual component? Was she posting photographs or anything like that?

Christa: No, I've never seen anything like that. It was more the fantasy and the lies. Like I said, she had a twin brother that her birth mom killed and then her birth mom was in prison—just crazy things that have never happened, you know? So it was more fantasy but never really sexual.

Right, and you didn't have any sense that there was like specific predators after her online? Did she have like—had she gathered around her a community of people that were attending to what she was posting that might have involved some of these more predatory characters?

Christa: She did gather a group of people from the trans community that gathered around her and was telling her how brave she is and how great she is, so she did gather that crowd.

Now, the crowd where she was saying she was a gang and stuff? No, not right, but in this other domain, she did.

Well, that's a very interesting form of reinforcement. Well, you see that in the culture at large, you know, that there's this insistence that these brave people who come out with their true identity are heroes of a sort, right?

And part of the problem with that is that, well, there are confused people who struggle their whole life to come out from what they're hiding behind to reveal who they are, let's say. But there's plenty of people who are narcissistic as can possibly be imagined who use that as a means of obtaining like a false status, and that's certainly—I would say something that the Biden Administration has been particularly complicit in producing.

If your daughter is unsure of herself and if she's unpopular, and she finds a group of people who are congratulating her on her bravery every time she takes a step in the direction of this revelation of identity, you know, Chloe told me that after a while, too, and I know another girl who is in this situation too. After a while, after you adopt a new identity like that, say as a boy, and you gather a bit of a community around you, it's pretty damn hard to step backwards, right?

Because you feel like you're the—one girl I'm speaking of, like she decided that she was a boy, and then some of her friends afterward, as a consequence of her influence, felt they were boys. And then when she decided maybe she wasn't a boy, and that was a bad idea, one of the things that she found very difficult was backing stepping backwards because now she felt guilty that she had enticed other people down this road, right?

So you start to produce these false identities, and they take a life of their own, like any lie does, right? And then if it's magnified by people, in some ways, the people online are doing exactly the same thing because they've taken dire steps in the wrong direction and are likely to encourage that in other people.

Exactly right.

Okay. So, but all things considered, you two weren't unduly concerned. You had some concerns about her popularity and about her storytelling. Did the teachers report any particularly unacceptable behavior at school during this time?

Christa: Yes, in that this wasn't a daily problem. Once every month to sometimes two months, something would happen. We'd hear her version of it, so we would write away because we're concerned parents; we interacted.

And the schools there are just very good at interacting with parents. They're not woke; they’re not all that. But they would say our daughter's version of that was not accurate. She actually instigated it or she caused the confrontation, even though what the other kids did was they're in trouble.

You know, they're in trouble, but if she's got a part to play in this too.

Right, right. It's almost like, how can I put this—if I keep poking at Todd and then he snaps at me, and then I'm like, "Oh my gosh, look what you did!" It was like that type of behavior, that kind of attention-seeking, victimizing, provocativeness.

However, there was always the sense though, and it's just what you said earlier, there was always a sense that this was going to be a short little battle because her brain's going to develop, and she's going to become a very smart girl.

I had no doubt this was going to be a very successful young adult. You know, I never thought, so there wasn't such a strong "I want to be trans," or there was none of that really going on that would have led to...

So you had confidence in her long-term outcome even absolutely because why?

Absolutely, why were you so certain of that?

Because if just given more time to grow up, you know, because kids have an awkward age. Yeah, she had a lot of attention when she was a kid. She was in our stores; customers would bring her stuffed animals. She'd been in a corporation, and people treat her like gold, and she grows up, and all of a sudden she's at an awkward age—glasses, braces, and all that.

Okay, and with the wrong kids. But eventually they'd be good kids and becoming an adult. The brain develops, and they settle into whatever gender they really are, and so you guys were still thinking that this was just...

Yeah, you were prepared to wait it out. You'd had lots of children; you'd gone through this with many kids already.

Sure.

One of my daughters, initially she was confused but became an adult and wasn't—said, "Boy, I can't believe I thought that way when I was younger. Good thing I didn't make bad decisions."

Yes!

Well, it’s not uncommon, and you could imagine too, like you've characterized your daughter as somewhat of a tomboy. I think that to some degree was confusing for tomboys forever, but they weren't also ever offered the opportunity of presuming that just because they had some aspects of their character that were more masculine that that meant was they had to surgically bring themselves into alignment with that, right?

Which is a very, very, very bad idea.

Okay, so all right, so you're going along with this situation, and you have some concerns, but you believe they'll reconcile themselves in the long run. And when do things break?

Todd: I'll let you tell most. We were coming back from Billings, Montana, from a medical appointment, and the location that our daughter worked had called and asked if our son could come in to work.

It all took off from there, and there was nothing in the middle. For over a year, just nothing but a good kid, great relationship, complete trust, and all of a sudden we find out that she had created this world at work.

Where she's known as a boy?

Todd: No, they all knew that she was female, but she went there and she presented this image that she's transgender and that they needed to buy into this and call her by a different pronoun and stuff.

They were all kind of like "Uh, I don’t know what to do with this," so they just played along with it.

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I see.

So they allowed her to go by Leo.

I see.

So she started... now is it accurate to say that she started to take the persona that she was playing with online and now start to... what would happen if she was playing this out in the world?

Yes, in the world, and so she built this little thing at her job and again that she was a boy and going by Leo and stuff. So it all came to a head on August 18th. The next week school was starting and she was going to be a ninth grader in high school.

And because of all of her past history with struggling in school, we said, "Hey, why don't we take a break from the summer job and go ahead and start high school? See where we can go with high school. And if at Christmas break you're doing great, which you always do great, and you know, things are under control, and you're not feeling too anxious or too bullied or anything, go back to your summer job. Maybe you can start working one day a week during, you know, like maybe one day a weekend on the winter hours."

And she obviously didn't want to do that. We also had talked to her about, "Hey, you know, they called and they said our son needed to come to work today, and you know what's going on with that? Or why are you doing this again?" You know, do we need to have a conversation about that?

And she was just mad. She's a mad teenager that day.

Okay, so let's—So you guys found out what she was doing at work, and you suggested to her that she stop the job temporarily and if things went well, she could pick it up again in the winter, essentially.

Which part of that do you think made her angry?

Well, you also called her out on the fact that she had been presenting herself as a boy at the job, so what do you think it was that made her angry? Did she really like the job? Did she feel you were interfering?

No, it wasn't that.

What do you think it was?

I think it was the fact that we called her out and this personality and this fantasy that she began living was now going to have to stop living.

Good way to put that.

It was, I think, that she had a little world within the world where she could be what she wanted to be at that time, and that was being imploded on her.

And instead, she also did not want to start high school, and there were some instances prior to school—and this is just days before school started—where some of the kids were already being mean. You know, that's true.

We took her to high school orientation, and some of the kids were already at high school orientation being mean to her.

I see, I see.

And so how do you think she was doing at her job in her new identity? I mean, people were playing along with that. Was she being bullied at work?

Christa: No, no. She did have a couple incidents where some people said things to her at work, and she came home upset, so not necessarily getting bullied, but there were people that were like, “You’re not a boy! We’re not playing along with this; that’s not how...” When she came home and was upset, that’s not what she’d say to us; she’d say, “Oh, the customers were really mean today,” you know, and things like that.

But in hindsight, and kind of putting it together with her boss, now that’s what was going on is people were like “You’re not a boy! What is wrong with you? Why are you acting this way?” and she would be very, very upset by the time she got home.

Okay, so she’s heading back to school, and she’s going into high school, so that’s a big transition, and it looks like there’s going to be some continuation of the same trouble. And she's not particularly happy about having had her new fantasy life at work exposed. Now is there anything else going on at the time? What else is happening?

Christa: She just strange problem. She started having really, really bad headaches, and she started having vision problems. We had full medical insurance; we took her in for everything. We were having her eyes constantly checked.

She was going through hair loss. She was wanting to wear ball caps all the time. She was having almost like—we don't know if they're hallucinations or what you would call it, but there was a combination of those things happening steadily, and she was just having terrible headaches.

And so that was a concern that we were having. It was adding to the other behavioral things and they seemed to go in line with that almost.

So in hindsight, we found out that one of her friends, who was another 14-year-old girl, was ordering her hormones off of Amazon and having them sent to her house, not ours, and then giving those to our daughter, Jennifer.

What were the hormones and how were those purchasable on Amazon, do you know?

Christa: They are purchasable on Amazon, and you don't have to prove that you're 18 or anything. You can just go in and buy them, and they were female-to-male hormones.

I could look it up and send it to you the exact ones if you want, but so we found out, after all this happened, that that's what was going on at the time because we couldn't figure it out.

I took her to the eye doctor three times and I was like, “Something must be wrong with her glasses, you know? You must be wrong. She’s having these headaches.”

And they were like, “No, we can’t find...”

Was the hair loss noticeable?

Christa: Yes, every one of the things that we said was listed as a side effect, and that’s if you're taking the right dosage, and you’re a teenager, and most likely when kids are prescribing drugs to kids, what’s the odds of them following the prescription if they’re in a hurry to try to become something else, you know?

So that’s what we are.

Oh yeah, Jesus, that’s brutal. Yeah, because, well, any... First of all, I had no idea that that was such an easy thing to do, and second, you just have absolutely no idea what that might do to her mental health or physical health, generally speaking, right?

And looking back, I can see things like she was acting more aggressive, like really quick to anger, you know. Her skin, her complexion just went terrible; like, I took her to the doctor. I was ordering or proactive, you know, all these things online. Just like, “What is going on with this kid's acne? Like, this is not normal for her!”

So in hindsight, I know it was now those hormones that she had taken herself.

Right, right. We didn't find this out until after CPS had taken her away.

Okay, so she’s off to high school. So continue the story. What happens on August 18th?

What had happened is we had the discussion with her about stopping the job and starting high school and starting fresh. She was very angry with us and very upset with us that day, but she even though she was angry, she was coming in and out of the room with us, you know. She'd talk to us and stuff, but then she'd be snippy, you know, and go back to her room—typical teenager behavior, so wasn't alarming.

So I got a call at exactly 1:48 from our local police department saying that our daughter had made text message comments to another child that she wanted to kill herself and that this was her intention.

I stayed on the phone with a police officer. I walked down the hallway to where she was, and I who reported that, I'm sorry. Who reported the text messages?

The other child that she made these comments to.

Did you think the child did that of her own accord, or was that a plan, or were their parents involved? Because that's very—a very, that's very odd.

She only met the child one time at a track meet like seven or eight months prior, but she had spun this whole thing with this other little girl that she had terminal cancer and that Todd and I weren't letting her get treatments.

I see, so this was part and parcel of a whole story.

Yeah, so I do think that the child reported it because I think the child was like she’s being terribly abused by these awful people.

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Yeah, so the police officer, like I said, he called. I went down the hallway, and I talked to Jennifer, and she was in her room, but the door was open. I was like, “Hey, you know, what's going on? The cops are on the phone. What is this about?”

I’ve seen other girls spin fantasies like that online and make false reports to other people of abuse in the household, and the social services teams come rampaging in like mad, right?

Yes.

And often the girls who have spun the fantasies, well, they’re taken completely aback by the consequences of their actions, but you know that’s another indication of that bit of tendency towards histrionic behavior, right? Dramatic and histrionic behavior that can produce these sorts of cascading consequences.

Okay, so this was reported to the police, right?

And so I stayed on the phone with the officer, and I spoke to our daughter, and I told the police officer, I'm like, “I don’t think, I think she’s just angry at us. She’s having a day, and this is something that she’s doing to act up and act out for attention.”

I said, “I’m not concerned. If I am concerned, I’ll certainly call you back. I’ll call an ambulance. I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure that she’s safe,” you know?

And so that was at about 1:48, and then at 7:40 that night is when Children’s Services showed up at our house because they said the police officer could not lay eyes on the child or speak to the child directly even though he didn’t ask.

He didn’t come over; he didn’t ask to see her; he didn’t ask for me to hand her the phone. None of that happened.

So at this point, and so how many people from Child Services showed up?

Just one lady.

Just one lady?

It's at this point we're like “Okay, well this has never happened before, and this is weird,” and you’re really taken back when children, you know, now you’re in trouble.

Yeah.

You’re like “What did I do? What’s going on around here?”

So we are very transparent because our attitude was being transparent. We have nothing to hide, so why not let them look at whatever they want to look at, and then they can go about their day and go on their way?

So we gave her a tour of the house; we showed her...

What do you think you should have done now in hindsight?

I think we should have said “No, that this isn’t; get out of here.” Like, you can lay eyes on the child if you want, but you’re not coming into our house. You’re not getting into our lives. There’s no reason for you to be here.

Like, we should have stood strong in the fact that—

Yeah, it’s tough because the natural prima facie—that if everything is okay is to do exactly what you did, to cooperate, and to believe that your cooperation will produce the best possible positive result.

My suspicions are now that for everybody watching and listening, if Child Services shows up at your doorstep, it’s time to get a lawyer like right now before you talk to them, before you do anything with them.

Do not presume axiomatically that they are on your side or that things are going to go well. In fact, I would say quite the contrary, and that was where we at. We thought “Oh well, they’re going to be on our side. They’re going to see that we’re dealing with a child who has some problems that we’re addressing, and then they’re going to go about their day.” And that’s not what happened.

So you’re showing this person around your house. What’s the interaction like with the person?

It was friendly; she was friendly; she was nice.

I mean, yeah, our home is just very stocked, very nice home. Our daughter is spoiled rotten for technology in her room.

The report was that she had taken 30 ibuprofen and drank—we haven’t gotten there yet. So what happened then?

She said she had to talk to Jennifer alone, and we were at that point; we were like “Wow, this is getting really...”

But we said, “Okay, you can talk to her alone.” They went out on the porch; they spoke for about ten minutes, and then Todd and I went out on the porch because we’re like, “We’re just not comfortable with this; this is going in a weird way. We’re not okay with this.”

And at that point, that’s when Jennifer had told the CPS worker that she had taken 30 ibuprofen earlier in the day at about 3:00, as well as she drank toilet bowl cleaner in an effort to end her life.

And we're like, "We know this didn't happen," because she has no signs of chemical burns. You know, she's not lethargic; she's not sick. And plus, I had been in the kitchen that day with my laptop at the table working where the ibuprofen and stuff were, and I know she hadn't taken any, you know?

She hadn’t...

I squirted away; I knew she hadn’t done it. But we were like, “We know that she tells stories and this is not true, but we’re going to go to the hospital and have her checked because we’re going to be safe,” as you could possibly be.

And then that’s where all the problems really, really started when we got to the hospital.

Continue, tell me what happened.

So we get to the hospital that night. You take her. Does the social worker come along with you at this point?

Does yes.

Okay, so all of you are going to the hospital. What sort of mood is your daughter in at the moment?

At that moment, nobody spoke. We weren’t really speaking; we were blown away by everything that just happened because we just had friends over and our daughter was having a really good time. She had a new puppy too that day, so she was really happy, and so we were really caught off guard by the whole thing.

And the way there, it was very quiet. We were just in a hurry to get there, and the whole time just wondering where all this came from. So quickly, you know, how did we go from zero to CPS at our house, and now we’re on the way to the hospital?

But so now you also don't know like this fantasy that came out about the ibuprofen and the toilet bowl cleaner. So you have no idea how far she’s taken multiple fantasies in her imagination, right?

And how—because this is what happens to people who wander off track, you know, is they start dwelling on fantasies and spend hours on them or hundreds of hours on them and develop a very elaborated alternative world or multiple alternative worlds.

And so God only knows where the story of the ibuprofen and the toilet bowl cleaner came out, you know, because you made reference earlier to the fact that she had shared some fantasies online with her online crowd, right?

About having a twin brother.

Yeah, like you just have no idea how much of that dreamlike world she's allowing to occupy her imagination, right?

Right, because it isn't—it’s surprising too because you say, “Well you were having a perfectly— as far as you could tell—a perfectly normal day, a happy day even! She got a new puppy!”

And yet as soon as she talks to the social worker, there’s this immediate fantasy of 40 ibuprofen and toilet…I mean, that’s a dramatic fantasy, right? I mean, killing yourself is one thing, but killing yourself with ibuprofen and toilet bowl cleaner—that’s pretty bloody brutal.

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Okay, so you're on the way to the hospital. You don't know what's going on. The social worker's with you. What happens when you get to the hospital?

So we get to the hospital, and they right away hook her up to EKGs, blood work, you know, the whole gambit. And we’re totally fine with that! Right away she says, "I’m transgender, and my parents don’t accept me, and everyone here needs to call me Leo."

The whole room was just kind of like crickets; no one really said anything. And so Todd and I stepped up and we said, “You know, she’s done this in the past; we’re not okay with it.”

She picked the worst possible moment to announce that, yes, right?

Especially to announce the fact that you guys don’t accept her, right? So now she’s really playing with fire, like seriously playing with fire. And so our reaction was, “You know, she’s done this before; we’re not okay with this; you need to address her by her birth name, and you know, her regular pronouns. And that’s what you told the people at the hospital?”

That’s what we told them right off the bat. We said, “We’re not okay with this; you need to just not call her Leo; her name is, you know, Jennifer. We’d like you to call her Jennifer. That’s her birth name, and we all need to get her treated and move on with what needs to be done now.”

What was our attitude? And so how many people are you telling this to?

The whole emergency room crew—there were probably five people in the room plus the...

Did you know or do you know in retrospect how many of them, so to speak, were on your side and how many of them were on your daughter’s side?

Because, you know, increasingly in institutions if a child goes into an institution and makes a claim like that, many hospitals now and many organizations are tilted, even formally, so that they're required to take the side of the child, correct?

And that is what happened.

That is, Jesus.

So we were at the hospital for five days.

After five days?

Yeah.

So we knew they said the three-day hold when someone tries to commit suicide or says they’re going to. Then they automatically go on a three-day hold, and we understood that. And we were like "Okay, so the whole time I’m going to the hospital for five, six hours a day because I’m her primary mother figure now."

And I don’t want to feel like just because you’re acting up and you’re being bad, we’re going to abandon you. That’s not how life works. You know?

Yeah, I’m not happy I have to sit down here all day long, but this is the way that life is and family is.

So I’m down there every day for five-six hours a day, and at this point, the hospital crew totally turns against me. So they start calling her Leo, and when I say “Hey, that’s not her name! I want you to call her by her birth name,” I’m getting a lot of rolling their eyes and sighing.

Yeah, that’s not good; that’s the best predictor of divorce in married couples who are seeking counseling. Eye-rolling.

Yeah, well, it’s a sign of contempt; it’s not good.

It’s not good.

So if that’s the sort of response you were getting, that was definitely indicative of the fact that you were now put in the unacceptable mother camp.

Absolutely.

And so right away, the aide starts saying things to her about how this particular aide herself is non-binary and is going to go have top surgery.

Oh boy.

And I'm like, "Hey, you know what? You need to shut this down! Like, this is not okay!" So I stayed calm because I felt like they were trying to bait me into a fight, and then they could look and turn around and say, “Look at these... look at—”

That’s a typical tactic, absolutely typical tactic.

It’s part of that provocativeness, is right there. Poke and poke and poke and poke and poke and poke and wait for an explosion, and then to say, "Well, I knew that you were the sort of person who would explode!"

Right.

And I felt like that’s what was happening to us. So Todd and I stayed very calm, and then you lose when you stay too calm because then they’re like, "Well, now you’re too calm."

No, no, well, the whole point of people who are manipulative like that— the whole game is to put you in a position where no matter what you do, you’re wrong, and they’re right.

You're wrong and bad, and they're right and good. That’s the game, right?

And so, and what it costs you, that's irrelevant; it's completely irrelevant. In fact, there’s more and more studies of people who behave in this way, because you get a kind of narcissistic manipulativeness.

But that slides very rapidly into sadism, and so not only do they want to be right and good at your expense, but if you suffer as a consequence, so much the better, right?

And if your daughter happens to have to be dragged along for the ride while they’re proving their moral superiority, no, they’re more than okay with that; that’s just part of the fun.

So, alright, so now there’s five days in the hospital; your daughter’s getting a lot of attention. They put an aide in there who’s going to be extraordinarily attentive to all of her whims, right?

Correct.

There’s one thing that’s really important here too. During this, to me, it’s the biggest thing is that right away, I’ve never heard our daughter ever talk about another state before. And there was talk about Wyoming, and then they said there are different facilities she could be sent to.

Almost all of them are in Montana but there’s one in Wyoming, but there was almost an unspoken language going on between our daughter and...

What are these facilities that she’s going to be sent to?

Why does that emerge as a discussion?

They said she needed acute psychiatric care because of the statements she was making about killing herself, and we were like "Okay."

And they said it would be inpatient.

So, oh God, we’re saying, "Okay, like if this is what needs to happen to help her, okay, let’s get this done." So we were told there were six facilities in the state of Montana, and like Todd said, that one—they started talking about Wyoming kind of off to the side, and it was kind of like a secret language if that makes sense.

Between your daughter?

Yeah.

Well, they said it like this, ‘cause right away, while they’re talking, I was just listening, and I went right to my phone and good old Google went to Google "What’s different about Wyoming?" And they showed the map of Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas; they all have laws banning transgender care.

Wyoming does not; they just lost on that battle, and the centerpiece of that is Casper.

Well, and of course lurking behind all this is your daughter’s unwillingness in all likelihood to go to high school.

Mhm.

Yeah, right. Because this gives her an out—Jesus, terrible.

At that point, you know, we— like Todd said, he had his phone. We looked up Wyoming, and we said to the doctor and the social worker outside of the room, because I was very careful not to have these conversations in front of her because I know she uses this information to be manipulative and get what she wants.

So outside the room, we had a conversation, and I said, “You know, we’re not okay with Wyoming, and here’s why.”

And tell me if she were to go to Wyoming what would be our rights? What's protecting us? What's protecting her when someone goes to inpatient care?

I was like, "What’s expected? Are we supposed to visit? Are you supposed to visit weekly? And how would we get from...?"

I mean, we could drive, but we’d have to put our whole business on hold and drive the eight hours to Wyoming, and is this expected of us?

You know, like help me out here, like tell me what’s supposed to happen. And I’ll never forget our CPS worker said to me, she said, “Oh, don’t worry about Wyoming. The chances of that happening are so slim, and we’ll all have a conversation and work through it together.”

If that’s what’s on the table.

Yeah, and when that got said, you could see immediate discomfort in our daughter like she had just been betrayed, and you could see almost a...we’re just telling your parents that isn’t what they said.

But that’s what the body language...

I see, so the notion here is that there’s covert planning going on behind the scenes.

Yeah, and I told her that right away when we left. I said, “They are going to send her to Wyoming.” That’s what I said.

So five days go by because they couldn’t find placement, and they were having trouble. On August 22nd, we were told that she was next in line for a bed at a facility in Billings.

So when we left the hospital that day, we were thinking, "Okay, well, she’s going to go to this Billings inpatient psychiatric care, and that’s four hours from us."

So if we’re expected to visit or take things down there, okay, so...

What do you think is in the offing for your daughter? Is she living as Leo at the moment?

She is.

And what’s the plan?

Her birth mom is in Canada with her and supports her being transgender, supports her being called Leo. I don’t know what health care she can get in Canada if she can get, you know, the double mastectomy and stuff. I don’t know what’s available to her, and that’s very—not just available, recommended.

Yes, that’s very, very scary to us.

And you know our greatest fear is that she will, I don’t know if you want to say grow out of this phase or come around from this phase, she’s 14.

Yeah, 80% of kids or more really grow out of it by age 18.

Yeah, and if you get them to what damage has been done? And at that point, does she, what if she really does want to kill herself then?

Like what have we done to support her and help her through the basic mental crisis that she had? I don't feel like the system helped her at all.

Well, you can say that again.

Montana, we found out just recently, leads the US according to an article on child takeaways by CPS.

True.

The capital of it in the whole United States, Montana.

So how do you guys reconcile yourself with your situation as citizens in the United States now?

I mean like this is—I’ve heard stories like this before, unfortunately. I’ve watched people who were perfectly good parents fall into the maw of Child Protective Services, often because their child was foolish enough to make a false complaint.

And then like all hell breaks loose.

You’re lucky—like, well, you guys weren’t lucky. Things really got out of hand for you.

But anybody whose life isn’t destroyed by that completely is fortunate.

So now you’re in a dire situation, and so is your daughter. What’s your next move, and what’s your status legally?

Because you guys, like you weren't supposed to put up this video, but yeah, here you are talking to me.

So why?

My suspicions are this isn’t going to make you very popular.

No, so that one of the lawmakers that actually passed the law said what?

That they're not following the laws correctly, and that's the whole problem here. It isn't the lawmakers; the lawmakers have the right laws up.

But CPS—and I don't know if woke is the word or whatever the word is to use that kind of evil—but they’re able to just go right around the laws like, "Oh, they’re going to ban this in Montana? We’re going to send her to Wyoming!"

Everything has been that way, and the lawmakers are commenting on our video, the video they made us take down. The people that were commenting on it were the lawmakers from the state, and they’re saying, "Yeah, this is wrong. They’re doing this 100% backwards."

So our situation now, to run back to it, is we are in contempt of court.

We have a court hearing on Wednesday.

And contempt of court for what exactly?

We’re not supposed to speak about our case or anything like that at all again. Everything that we talk...

Why are you...

Because I keep telling people our family has been destroyed. There'll never be a family unit of Christa, Todd, and Jennifer again.

We’re—that is done. Our life that way as we know it is destroyed, and the best thing that we can do is make sure that this doesn’t happen again, at least in the state of Montana.

I mean we have to get the word out; we have to do whatever we can do to make sure.

Why are you willing to take that risk?

Because it's the right thing to do, for one, and for another, we don't want another family to go through what we've gone through.

Oh, absolutely.

And also, it’d be a crime not to because when did the US shift to a country where CPS can say you don’t even get a voice?

2015? What have we said here today that is harmful to anybody? That it has to be gag ordered, banned?

Be you why and yeah.

Well, I can see, you know, to some degree you’ve already had everything that can really be taken away, and that’s another thing— you know, they’ve already taken our child.

That’s right; that’s right.

What’s next?

That’s exactly right.

Going to take my house?

Well, I would also say, like you, your best determination is to go out with guns blazing, you know.

And that’s where we’re at, right?

Absolutely, make absolutely every bit of this as public as you possibly can, right?

And assume even if you get nailed on Wednesday, if you get nailed for contempt, which you will—you know more of it.

More of it, yeah, you know, because the more attention that you attract to what’s happened to you, the more effective your stance is going to be.

So I would say my family has been under attack many times for not—for things not quite as dire as what you’re going through, but your silence is what’s required.

Exactly.

And you have the weapon of your voice, right?

And if we’re quiet, then we’re helping the system.

Absolutely not.

How is that helping another family? It’s not, or you for that matter or you.

I mean, you know, there’s still some possibility that you could see your way through this.

Like I’ve seen families who’ve gone through situations similar to yours or worse even still weave things back together eventually, you know?

Yes.

So people grow up, things change, and we are open to that, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that would be the best possible case scenario.

You know what? Your daughter’s really going to want in the depth of her heart is to see that you are doing absolutely everything you can to fight 100% for her.

You know, and to whatever degree the part of her that’s still oriented in her own favor isn’t completely buried, it’s going to be—that part’s going to be looking to see what sort of commitment you have to her long-term thriving.

So Wednesday, right?

Yes.

And we have a First Amendment attorney involved, you know, that they filed appeals in the Supreme Court and stuff, and...

Well, you’re lucky. In the United States you have pretty powerful free speech protection, so with any luck that will actually protect you.

In Canada the situation’s much worse.

We have a Charter of Rights, but that bloody thing isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, and so basically in Canada it’s already been decided that any half-wit mid-level bureaucrat, of exactly the sort that you guys have been tangling with, can put pretty much any restrictions whatsoever on freedom of speech and freedom of association and, well, those two in particular for whatever reason they deem reasonable.

So but you do have First Amendment protection in the US, so my suspicions are: if you keep fighting this that you’ll probably win.

How are you affording this?

We have a GoFundMe, you know. I mean, we’re trying to rally and raise money. We, at one point—not to jump backwards—but at one point we were told, you know, CPS has a budget of like $3.5 million. And so we’re like, "Why can't—why does our family unit, because they’re saying that we have to have a treatment plan, which their treatment plan is they want us to go to marriage counseling and accept Jennifer for what she is."

I said, “No, you’re not going to make me go to—you didn’t—you just socially transitioned my daughter, and now you want me to go to counseling to accept that?”

No, the answer is no.

That’s no way.

That’s not going to happen.

Go ahead and record it!

They did!

They actually did want us to go to counseling to learn how to raise—

They wanted me to go to counseling in Canada to be reeducated?

No, like, no.

And so they said we have to...

Yeah, yeah, no, I understand. I understand.

So they’re saying, "No, you don’t understand. They were laughing at us the other day— they’re like, ‘You don’t understand, you have to go.’"

And I'm like, "I don’t have to go to counseling to accept something that I’m—that’s not true!"

Like, if you told me you were a unicorn, I don’t have to go to counseling to accept that!

I didn’t tell you that before this started; it’s a hell of a time to bring it up now!

That’s just crazy, you know?

And so, no.

It’s not just crazy; it’s mandatory, and it’s illegal not to do it.

Right; that’s how crazy it is.

And so our—so we’re working with people who are like, “Why, okay, this is the first transgender case in the state of Montana, so why can't they work with us a little bit and say, ‘Let’s bring in an expert and say, how do you reunify this family that you, you know, you not, that is definitely not the goal?’”

The goal is exactly what happened to you.

That was the goal, right?

And the goal is the eventual full transition of your daughter; that is the goal for sure.

And publicly and hopefully, it will cause you a lot of pain along the way.

Mhm.

That’s the goal, make no mistake about it.

Yeah, well, good luck with your court case.

Keep me posted.

We will!

Yeah, maybe what we should do—you guys can decide this—but maybe we should do a brief follow-up by Zoom after your court case.

Think about it for a couple of days because they’re going to come down like a ton of bricks on you, I imagine.

And so then you’ll have to decide, you know, what you’re willing to do.

Well, we were told by— we were told by an attorney before we walked out here that the Press is filing action to be in the courtroom on Wednesday because they want to be able to report on the contempt of court charges and see what happens to us.

So we were told that they’re trying to do that, and at this point, I think the judge said no, so Monday...

Monday is a court holiday, is it?

Yes.

So on Tuesday, the Press has lawyers that are going to file now, being a little more persistent, like "No, they have a right for freedom of speech; the Press has a right to report on this. You have to let them in."

One quick thing though—that they’re not playing by the same rules, though. We have the governor’s office making comments about us that are wrong, and not only that.

You guys are way outside the domain of rules; this is no man's land and war.

Oh yeah, you’re way outside the...

We’ve been accused of having like meth labs and living in squalor and all kinds of stuff like that.

Well, if you’re going to have a meth lab, you might as well live in squalor, you know?

You might as well, like this.

We were out for dinner. We were actually out for dinner while they had our daughter, and this is—we had one of the staff members from the hospital we think is one of the nurses that evidently interviewed our daughter or something actually approached us in front of a crowded—we were at a crowded place, out for dinner—and started raising our voice at us, saying we should have allowed her to transition, that we should have promoted that, we should have backed her on what she wanted.

And everybody heard it!

Now, they did suspend us after this.

Okay, let's end with this. Let’s end this section. I’m going to continue talking for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side, just so everybody who's listening knows, and I think I'm going to talk to this couple about their feelings about the country they live in now.

I would say and what’s happened to it, because I would like to delve into that to some degree, and what they think is going to happen to them in the future.

So, join us for that. Join us for that.

Okay, so I do have one question for you. You know, you guys have been under a lot of pressure to admit to the wrongdoing that you’ve committed, right?

The fact that you didn’t abide by your daughter’s demands—the fact that you’re unfit parents as a consequence of that—the fact that now you’re doubling down so hard that you’re willing to divide the courts.

To what degree have you had periods of time where you wondered whether you were in the wrong?

It’s happened.

Yeah, well, I imagine...

I can’t... sometimes daily. Like sometimes I say, “Gosh, is this worth it? Should we just walk away and, you know, go live quietly somewhere?”

But no, that’s not the right thing to do; that doesn’t help anybody else, so we’re going to keep fighting.

It just enables it to get worse and worse and worse.

Oh yeah, it’ll get worse; there’s always... Hell is a bottomless pit, because no matter how bad it is, there’s some stupid something that somebody can do to make it worse.

And so, yeah, yeah, brutal.

Well, I’m very sorry to hear what’s happened to you, and congratulations on your courage. That’s rare—way rarer than you think, way rarer than you want to think.

Most people, they retreat into silence, you know, or they explode, and you can certainly understand that.

And so you’ve managed neither of those, and so...

Well, I’d rather be in contempt of their court than God’s court, though.

Yeah, well, that’s right; that’s for sure, that’s right.

Alright, well, to everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. To the film crew here today, appreciate your help. To Daily Wire Plus people for making this conversation possible, that’s much appreciated as well. [Music]