American Thought Leaders - ‘Billboard Chris’ Elston: A Child Is Never Born Wrong

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

“Empathy, kindness, understanding: Yeah, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what’s really going on? Lies, deception, and physical child abuse.”Chris Elston was living a normal life as the father of two girls in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, when he became aware of what he calls the “greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history.”“And the only thing I could do was to have some signs made and go outside,” he says.Over the last few years, Billboard Chris, as he’s commonly known, has had conversations about gender ideology with tens of thousands of people on the streets of cities across North America. He’s also been assaulted by gender activists close to 40 times—including one case in which his arm was broken.“The actual cure, historically, for gender dysphoria, is puberty itself,” says Mr. Elston. “These puberty blockers, combined with the cross sex hormones, are sterilizing children. They’re sterilizing thousands of autistic kids. And we’re supposed to be the bigots who are speaking out against this? It’s total madness.”We discuss the taboos and developments around gender and what Mr. Elston has gleaned about this topic from his conversations with ordinary people on the street.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Empathy, kindness, understanding. Yeah, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what's really going on? Lies, deception, and physical child abuse. Chris Elston was living a normal life as the father of two girls in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, when he became aware of what he calls the greatest child abuse scandal in modern history.

The only thing I could do was to have some signs made and go outside. Over the last few years, Billboard Chris, as he's commonly known, has had conversations about gender ideology with tens of thousands of people on the streets and cities across North America. He's also been assaulted by gender activists close to 40 times. In one case, his arm was broken.

The actual cure, historically, for gender dysphoria is puberty itself. These puberty blockers, combined with the cross-sex hormones are sterilizing children. Thousands of autistic kids. And we're supposed to be the bigots? It's total madness. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Chris Elston, or Billboard Chris, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me on.

Let's talk about my favorite thing that you wear on your billboard. And that is, children are never born in the wrong body. It's such a simple idea and such a conversation starter, apparently. Tell me about that. Yeah, so I have that one. I have children cannot consent to puberty blockers, which I wear most of the time as well. And our kids are being taught that they might have been born wrong. I've actually altered my message a little more recently. I've kind of dropped the wrong body part,

because I think sometimes when you say children are never born in the wrong body, people get confused a little bit. They need to think about that. So I've shortened it to just children are never born wrong, because people understand that right away. What are we doing teaching children that they need to be something they're not? Because at the very core of gender ideology, that is exactly what is being taught to our kids. This is almost like a quasi-religious movement where they're led to believe they have a gendered

soul. That somewhere on the inside they have this gender identity that doesn't match their biological sex. And it's complete nonsense. The whole theory of gender identity is nonsense. All a gender identity is is a personality. So I have this expression, there are two sexes, zero genders, and infinite personalities because I think that sums us all up and we'd all be better off as a society if we just got rid of this word gender altogether. Where did the idea come from to wear a billboard? So I started learning about what I consider to be the greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history.

This business of giving kids puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries to modify their body to appear more like the opposite sex. I started learning about this in 2019. I came across this term puberty blockers and so I started reading about this and of course I came across this term, puberty blockers, and so I started reading about this. And of course, these drugs are doing exactly what they say. They're blocking puberty in children. I'm a dad of two girls. At that time, they were 7 and 9 years old.

They're 11 and 14 now. But I started researching this, and all throughout 2020, I was reading every night about all of this stuff. It gets worse the more you read. And then in July of 2020, a woman in the UK named Kelly J. Keene, or Posey Parker, a lot of people know her as, she put up a very controversial sign at the Edinburgh train station that said, I heart J.K. Rowling. I love J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author, because of course J.K. Rowling has spoken out against the assault on women's rights and of course this child abuse as well.

And that sign only lasted a day because some people on Twitter complained that it was hate speech and the government-run train authority took it down. So I'm a dad of girls. I'm not sending them into a crazy world that doesn't even know what a woman is or that's trying to change the sex of children. And I was tired of people not being able to speak about this. When kids are being harmed, we should be having a lot of conversations. Instead, nobody was talking about it. They were afraid of getting fired from their jobs. So my whole objective has been to start conversations. So I followed her lead and I put up a big billboard, an actual billboard in Vancouver,

Canada that said I love JK Rowling. It lasted a day as well because a Vancouver politician said it was hate speech. She pressured the sign company and they took it down. I was prepared for this and that night I leveraged all the outrage online into a quick little fundraising campaign and a week later I had the same billboard up in San Francisco, then Portland, LA, all throughout Utah, here in DC, all throughout the metro, and Times Square. So that was my September of 2020. But in Canada where I'm from no sign companies would work with me. I'm'm a nobody I'm just a normal

dad living out in the suburbs who was living a normal life prior to this and the only thing I could do was to have some signs made and go outside and I wear them just because it's easier than holding them all day and I know I look ridiculous but I wear a blazer to try to offset that a little, look more professional. And I just have conversations. Because, as I said, we have to talk about this. So I knew that if I kept going, and took all the abuse and the assaults and all that stuff that happens, that this would grow into something.

A couple of quick questions before we continue, okay? The first one is, you know, you're saying you're this mild-mannered, unassuming, suburbanite dad. But suddenly this, this is the thing. Have you thought about, because it was a big shift, right? Right. I've never been to a protest in my life before this. So I'm not some activist guy. But like all parents, the most important thing in my life is my kids. And all these children are coming to harm. And there's a

funny thing about this. The parents of these kids cannot speak up. Because they're going to alienate their own child if they do and they're also at risk from the authorities in many jurisdictions. Depends where you live but in Canada now all the MPs voted unanimously to call it conversion therapy to help your child feel comfortable with their sex. It's okay to convince your little girl she's a boy and that she needs to become a sterilized anorgasmic, lifelong pharmaceutical patient. But it's not okay to object to that

and help her feel comfortable as a girl. That's now considered conversion therapy and you can go to jail for five years. Let me get this straight. All federal MPs in Canada, for the benefit of our audience, we're both actually Canadian, right? But voted unanimously.

That's right. Has anyone shifted their position since then? Sorry, I laugh, but no. Well, no, the reason I'm asking is your work and many other people's work has actually shifted the conversation somewhat since that time. I mean, a lot of this stuff works through obfuscation, through, you know, changing of language. You think you're supporting something, you don't realize what you're supporting in many cases, right? Right. And if we were to give these members of parliament the benefit of the doubt, we could say they didn't realize what they were

supporting. But I know that they did. Because I think in the history of Canadian politics, this bill received more briefs than any other bill, or close to it. There was a ton of debate. There were hearings held for the first bill. So in 2021, there was a bill called Bill C-6. It was the same bill that ended up passing. But this bill at the time did not pass unanimously through the House. 62 Conservatives voted against it. About 50 voted for it, including the current leader, Pierre Polyev.

And this bill didn't pass the Senate before the election was called. So when an election is called, all bills die. Trudeau won again. This bill came back. And this time, they just pushed it through unanimously. Same bill. And the substance of it is? Is that it would be conversion therapy to help your so-called transgender child become cisgender. Now these are made-up terms as far as I'm concerned. There's no such thing as a transgender child. They're called girls and boys, right? And if a girl is a tomboy,

or if a boy is more effeminate, well that's okay. That's the positive message we should be sending, that they're beautiful just as they are. No drugs or scalpels needed. But in this society, if a girl now says she's a boy, we are just supposed to take this 12 year old child at her word. And the trend is even no therapy, no counselling, because to even suggest counselling would be to invalidate the child's gender identity, as though there's something wrong with a girl saying she's a boy. Why would they need counselling for that? This is the theory of the radical left. So it's a one-way street. It's okay to say you're trans. It's not okay to object to harming your child with these experimental drugs and surgeries and help

them feel comfortable with their sex. So yeah, that's a criminal offense now. Good luck prosecuting it. They haven't prosecuted anybody. And I don't anticipate them trying that anytime soon. Because for me, I think the real purpose of this bill is just to scare people. It's to silence them. And it works. It's silenced the whole therapeutic profession. Most counselors won't even talk to these kids anymore. I get parents contacting me saying, Chris, I can't find a counselor in British Columbia, or even from the United States. I get parents contacting me saying, Chris, I can't find a counselor in British Columbia, or even from the United States. I have this email from a mom recently, in the entire state of Washington, she couldn't find a counselor. So she came to me looking for help. I probably know three

people across Canada who will talk to these kids. And we're talking about hundreds of thousands of kids in North America who've been diagnosed now with gender dysphoria. When I first heard about you, I was under the impression that one of your daughters had somehow gotten caught up in this and that was your motivation. Right. Right. And then I kind of learned a little more through some mutual friends and so forth. But the, the, the, the second question I have is, you know, it's one thing to have a strong idea. It's another thing to back it with money, which clearly you did.

You're putting up big billboards. It doesn't come cheaply. People might think there's some kind of dark money funding, Chris. So how does this work? Yeah. I'm getting by these days. People donate through my website, $30, $50. That's literally how I'm kind of getting by.

I did run up some debt for quite a while, and I was running up my credit cards and then working to pay them off. But because it was that important to you. Yeah, I don't care about money. Obviously, we have to take care of ourselves, and I need to take care of my kids, but money's never been a driver. There's always been this deeper part of me

that is concerned about the world we live in. And so that remains. And I don't think I'm going to get into it all today, but I've had some unique experiences in my life, and I've actually had some bad luck, and I've had a lot of suffering. And so I think that gives you a different perspective on life. I didn't care about all the abuse that I knew was going to come my way because I know who I am.

My wife and kids know who I am. And that's all that matters, honestly. Anyone else can say whatever they want. Now these hit pieces that get written about me, sometimes I retweet them myself. Just, I don't care. And just for fun and to show them that it doesn't bother me because that's what they're trying to do.

What about your daughters and your wife? How are they, you know, I'm trying to imagine what that looked like, right? Yeah. Well, throughout 2020, before I took this leap, you know, every night I'd be reading about this. And my wife would be marking homework because she's a teacher or marking her kids' tests or whatever. And she knew I was passionate about this I don't think anyone understood how far I was willing to go to put a stop to this because I had a vision for how to do this and it's

not complicated we just need to talk about it because we have the truth on our side this is so crazy in no society can this possibly last. Because when you come between parents and their children, and when you teach kids that they're born wrong and they need to be something they're not, there's not a hope that can be sustainable. It's always simply been a matter of how long it takes to put a stop to this child abuse. It's just a question of how many kids are harmed before we stop this. I've been more optimistic than pretty much everyone I've met because I also have the advantage of talking to tens of thousands of people on the street.

And I've known from day one that there's overwhelming support for my message, your message, all of us on the side of common sense, that children are never born in the wrong body. They're beautiful just as they are. That we shouldn't be keeping secrets from parents when a kid at school adopts a transgender identity. Because it's the policy across pretty much every school board in Canada, and many states in the US as well, to hide from parents that their own child has a new name and pronouns. These are psychological interventions that unqualified 22-year-old teachers are subjecting children to. The NHS in the UK conducted a systematic review of all of the evidence for all of this.

And part of that was they said, pronouns are not a benign intervention. This is harmful. This is psychologically abusive. You've got a struggling child who universally these kids have something else going on. There is autism. At the Tavistock, the biggest gender clinic in the world, in the UK,

from their own statistics of 1,038 children, 35% had moderate to severe autism, never mind the mild cases. These are kids who've been sexually abused, probably in more than half the cases. I was speaking with Quentin Van Meter yesterday. He's a pediatrician. He deals with these kids. He told me it's probably about 60%. There's trauma. There's abuse. There's eating disorders. There's borderline personality disorder, there's kids in state care are way overrepresented. In British

Columbia, there's a psychologist who works for the Ministry of Children and Family Development. His name is Wallace Wong. He gave a talk at the Vancouver Library a few years ago where he said he's transitioning more than 1,000 kids, including more than 500 in the foster system. That's 8% of all children in state care are being socially or psychologically transitioned by this one doctor. He then sends them to the BC Children's Hospital, who will give them puberty blockers and all that. These are kids that need help. They need help. They're crying out for help. It took me a while to just grasp the magnitude of the harm because the way this big quotes gender affirming care model works is you push that all to the side and you just affirm, affirm, affirm. In other words, you don't help them.

Right. With all those things that they really need help for. I think it's difficult for people to fathom that something like this could be real, that this is really a process that thousands of kids, never mind young adults, have been put through. It is difficult to fathom. That's one of the reasons it grew so fast, because people don't believe it when they first hear it. Without evidence, who's going to believe that doctors are cutting off the breasts of 12-year-old girls because these girls want to be boys? This is happening in the greatest nation on earth that's ever existed. Their

own statistics show this. There's a young girl named Layla Jane. She's suing right now. She was 13 when they cut off her breast. She was in grade eight. She's got autism. She'd had trauma. She's just a young kid. And this reminds me actually of your sign, children cannot consent to puberty blockers, right? That's right. So with the boys, for example, we've got the president of WPATH, which is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

They write what are called the standards of care that these gender clinics can follow. They're just guidelines. And Marcy Bowers, this man who says he's a woman, he admits in a Zoom call that none of the boys who started on puberty blockers at what is called Tanner Stage 2, that's the beginning of puberty, they're probably 10, 11 years old, 12, none of the boys as adults have been able to have an orgasm.

Every single child who was, or adolescent, who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 has never experienced orgasm. I mean, it's really about zero. So, tell me, what 10 or 11 year old boy who can't even conceive of the concept can possibly consent to throwing away their adult sexual function? Of course they can't. What child struggling with mental health comorbidities, an abusive home life, whatever's going on, can consent to sterilizing themselves? These puberty blockers combined with the cross-sex hormones are sterilizing children. They're sterilizing thousands of autistic kids. And we're supposed to be the bigots who are speaking out against this? It's total madness. So we just have to stop caring what unintelligent,

ill-informed people say about us. And do you want to look back at your life in 40 years and say you knew about all this child abuse and did nothing? I didn't. And that's how I viewed this. And I wasn't going to look back at my life and say I did nothing because I knew I could do something. And when you know you can do something and you talk to parents like I do, and you're sitting across the table at Tim Hortons from some big brawny dad, and he's bawling his eyes out because he's losing his girl to this. and he can't speak up and the authorities are against him. Well, someone's got to represent these parents. And a lot of the doctors won't speak up either because they're worried about losing their license. Well, let's talk about the street.

Sure. Okay, because, I mean, I don't know how many, I don't know if you've counted how many interactions you've had now over this, however many years, right, on the street. But, you know, hundreds for sure, probably thousands. Oh, tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. Wow. Okay. For sure. And so what's it like out there with your sign?

Depends where I go, but it's overwhelmingly supportive. Some people don't know at all. So they'll come up and they'll say, what are puberty blockers? And I might have a 30-second conversation because it doesn't take long to explain this. Kids who think they're trans are being given a drug that stops their bodies from going into puberty. And the average reaction right away is, what? They don't believe it.

Today though, because there has been so much work of awareness, most people have heard about them now. In the beginning, almost nobody. Now I get support nonstop. People give me high fives, fist bumps, honking their horns, coming up just to thank me because they've seen me in whatever video and the far left who push this are losing greatly they've got a lot of money on their side and a lot of organizations pushing this and governments and the UN and the WHO but we've got truth on our side and the truth spreads for free and it's unstoppable and once people learn this truth, they never forget it because they're doing this to kids and their own kids

are in danger. Well, not everybody, and I've seen some of the videos, right? Not everybody is fist pumping. That's right. So I said, yeah, it depends where I go. Universities, of course, there's going to be more indoctrinated young people. And when you're in a city, I mean course there's gonna be more indoctrinated young people and when you're in a city I mean there's hundreds of thousands of people you're gonna run into some angry violent people and that happens from time to time too. I've got strategies for dealing with the people who are immediately angry and for the violent people because I have been assaulted close to 40 times I just take it because that's far more powerful than reacting with anger.

When you can just be peaceful and calm in the face of violence, that's an extraordinarily powerful visual. I don't want to be scrapping in the street, that's a terrible look. And so I just take it. And I think the people who would come at me that way have learned that it doesn't work with me, so they've kind of stopped trying. But there's a third category, and this is, you know,

you've documented this quite well, I think. The third category is people who start quite belligerent but end up, it almost seems like like friendly or better even in some cases from what I've seen. Yeah, that's happened a lot. It's probably a few hundred times. There was a black gay man at the University of Pennsylvania who rode by on his bike swearing at me.

And sometimes with the men, I'll challenge them a little to come back you know and to this man's credit he did. You know come have a conversation why are you just yelling and so he did and we talked for 80 minutes outside the university and at first he was extremely agitated sometimes people are shaking because they get an adrenaline rush. His face was ticking.

And with people who disagree with me or think they disagree with me, I will say things that I know they cannot possibly disagree with. For example, there's no right way to be a girl or a boy. Our kids are beautiful just as they are. If a girl is a tomboy, if a boy is more effeminate, well, fine. We shouldn't put kids in stereotypical boxes. No one can object to that. The left think they don't like stereotypes.

They'll all agree with that message. But they have this blind spot where they don't see they're pushing stereotypes to such a degree that if a girl is more masculine, oh, she must be trans. I give speeches where I ask the women in the audience, you know, who here was a tomboy growing up? It's always more than half of the audience. I'll ask them, who among the women here enjoyed going through puberty? Not one arm has yet gone up in the air. Because it's just a tough time in life, and they've got to get through it.

Their bodies are changing, they're getting sexualized by men and all this stuff. But, you know, we've just got to let them grow up. This is the first time in history we've ever dealt with a movement like this. We've been around on this planet for a few hundred thousand years as a species. Kids weren't killing themselves because they were going through puberty. And the only thing that the left ever says is that kids will commit suicide if we don't transition them. That's their only argument. You know, something just struck me, though. You know, puberty traditionally has been an incredibly important part of the development process. In fact, you know,

it was something that was enshrined, something you need to be proud of, you need to live up to almost, right, to transition from child to adult. And this is weirdly like the kind of the antithesis of that, where you say that should not happen. Right. The theory among these ideologues is that it would be too dramatic for a girl to start looking like a woman or for a boy to look like a man, because that can't be undone. So the theory is block puberty to keep them looking neutral, then give them the opposite sex hormones. And the sales pitch is that, oh, puberty blockers just buy them time to explore their gender identity. It's nonsense. In 98% of the cases when kids go on puberty blockers, they progress to the cross-sex hormones.

Because they're not just signing up for puberty blockers. They're signing up for the whole thing. The blockers, the opposite sex hormones, the surgeries. Because they've bought into this idea that they were born wrong, and they need to look like the opposite sex to find true happiness. Because right now they're depressed. They're miserable because of whatever's going on in their life. And they're being sold this lie that it's because they're born wrong. The actual cure, historically, for gender dysphoria is puberty itself.

Before they gave kids puberty blockers, if you look at all the academic studies going back decades, the most recent one followed 139 boys from a very young age and into their 20s. 87.8% of them just grew out of it. When they went through puberty, 63.6% grew up to be gay. Now, these same kids would all get puberty blockers. They would block the cure. So this is totally insane. I'm remembering a video that you showed me once, which was a gay man coming up to you and saying, you know, I was an effeminate kid.

I probably would have been transitioned or, you know, a little more crudely perhaps. I'm gay. And you know, when I was young, I was a feminine gay kid. You know, if I was a gay, feminine kid today, they would have taken my manhood. They would have taken my manhood. Yeah, these kids who would grow up to be gay today are being taught that just because they're effeminate, little boys, that they must be trans. This is also about the erasing of gay men and lesbians.

Yeah, that was in Vancouver. I was actually with a film crew from the Telegraph in the UK. And there were a couple gay men who had walked by who were berating me, I guess. And then two other gay men happened to come by, and they started arguing with these other gentlemen. I gotta go. Okay, I support the gay community 100%. No, you don't. You don't. You don't support this. We shouldn't be giving... I'm gay. You don't support this. Okay, you are gay. I support this. You're, you're, you're, yeah, yeah. I support this. The bad thing is that it says gender and ideology on the back. So, I think that's a powerful video because it shows that the gay community is not a monolith, you know. They're just like people. We all have different opinions. And it's really powerful because it is some of these kids that would grow up

to be gay who are being harmed and what is the deal here? Is this kid gay or are they trans? Now I never attach sexuality to children at all, we shouldn't do that, it's creepy. They're not gay, they're not straight, they're just kids. But historically, a lot of them do grow up to be gay. And what the left has been successful in doing is conflating gay rights with trans rights. And they've made this into a civil rights movement. Now, around 2010, all these organizations kind of won the gay rights that they were campaigning for. So these TQ organizations, I don't call them LGBTQ, they're just TQ organizations now, they don't just shut the doors and say we achieved our objectives. They've got to keep donations flowing, they've got to keep the doors open and everyone employed, and

they change their objectives to trans rights. And these five letters combined, LGBTQ, strike fear in the hearts of men. It stops people from talking. Well, there's entire rating systems like the one that Human Rights Campaign has, which essentially if you go down on your scale, you can be, well, there's consequences over years which have been created. What's really interesting, you're talking about, of course, no group is a monolith, obviously, right?

But the way this seems to work, and not just in this area, is people purport, I stand for all LGBTQ, for example. Like our organization, our extreme position on everything actually, the entirety of this incredibly diverse group, I might add, right? Yeah, it makes no sense. It's not even a group, right? Yeah. It's honestly just a tactic to silence people. The 2S, in Canada, they always go 2S first. This is two spirit. Apparently, it's a term for trans indigenous people. But this was made up by white people in the 90s, to be honest with you, in academia. But 2SLGBTQIA+. So they're lumping asexual people in. They're lumping people with disorders of their sexual development, medical conditions, into this. It's just this huge identity group, and we need to get away from all this identitarianism and just get back to my identity is a human being. And we're all different.

Because this is just a means of causing division in society and of silencing people. And we have to get back to our roots. I'm just remembering another clip that you filmed, which involved, I guess, an Antifa guy being kind of surprised that not you know, not everyone's on his side that was around, I guess would be the way to put it. You know what I'm talking about.

Yes, I was in London recently, England, and I was there for a conference. But this large pro-Palestine Hamas rally was going on, of course. And so I just went out on the streets of London with my signs on I ran into a couple people I knew and this Antifa guy I think he was from America it might have been Canada he swore at me yelled at me so for me that's an invitation for a conversation so I struck up a conversation I did usual thing, I started asking him some questions, because that's the other thing you need to do with these aggressive people, is ask them to define what it is they believe in.

What does it mean for a girl to be a boy? And then just pause. So this man was getting flustered, and three Muslim girls came along, they were probably 17, 18 years old, to see what all the hullabaloo was about. And he turned to them for support. And he said something like, this guy thinks kids can't be trans. And instantly they said, they can't. And they started berating him for about a minute and he ran off. So this was this beautiful moment of intersectionality where he's there to support them because all these far left people are supporting these protests. And he automatically thinks that they're going to support him, but nothing could be further from the truth so it's

where these worlds collide and you have these people out there with their signs queers for palestine for example well go to palestine see what happens you're going to be thrown off a roof literally because it's illegal to be thrown off a roof, literally, because it's illegal to be gay in these countries. They're not progressive at all. But the so-called progressives in the West are trying to lump themselves into these causes. They're stuck in this mindset that they're oppressed and that there are these oppressors out there,

these cis-heteronormative white guys like me are at the top of the oppression pyramid, and they're terribly oppressed. It's neo-Marxism. Communism has kind of been rebranded these days as equity, which is equality of outcome, and that's not what we're about in the West. We're about equality of opportunity, where anyone who works hard and works smart can achieve something for themselves. And communism went all throughout the East and South America and Asia, but it never really grabbed hold in the West, and I think it's been rebranded.

And the same people who argue with me on the streets about gender ideology are the same people pushing all these other causes as well because they just see me as an oppressor. I guess you don't think of yourself that way. Yeah, I think advocating for the long-term health of children and letting them grow up and telling them that they're great just as they are, I don't believe that to be oppressive, no. Right, I mean it's just it's really is everything completely turned on its head. I mean this this area is so obvious, right?

Maybe not as obvious in other areas that you're describing. Yeah, and even these conversations, it takes a bit of, you know, it takes a few minutes to get even just to the very basics. To have a thorough conversation about what's happening is easily an hour. We could talk for hours. But the sports issue, for example, where you've got Leah Thomas in the pool, literally lapping women when he was 500th in the male division, everyone sees that and they know instantly it's wrong. Even with that, people are afraid to speak up, but they get that right away. This conversation about child transition, it takes a bit more time to educate the population. And over time,

when enough people get educated, and it probably only takes 2, 3, 4% of the population to get up to speed on this, we become an unstoppable force. And I think we're already at that. And I have a financial background. I used to be an investment advisor. So even before I started, I viewed this like compounding interest. You start with a dollar, you double it, two dollars, four dollars, eight, pretty soon you're at a million. It's the same with this.

This is the snowball rolling downhill. When I started there were probably five men on Twitter, online, talking about this, who reached any significant number of people. There was almost none. Now, this is the number one cultural issue of the day on conservative media and podcasts all day long. Even the leftist publications are starting to tell the truth. The New York Times has, the Reuters has, the Washington Post has even honestly covered some stories of detransitioners. And that's another thing that's been my focus from day one is telling these stories of detransitioners. They're the ones who

need to be heard. They cannot be denied. They were 13 years old, they were harmed for life, they can't have kids. What are what is the left going to do to deny their lived experience? They can't do it. So these stories need to be told. And we're winning spectacularly. I remember not even two years ago, I was at the Heritage Foundation for a conference with about 35 people from across the country fighting this. I think I was the most optimistic person there because I have a unique experience out on the streets, but I knew this wasn't going to take 10 years. And just a year and a half later, we've got 22 states who have passed legislation to stop this. There were two main things that happened in 2022. Matt Walsh's film, What is a Woman,

woke up a lot of people. This is where he doesn't even offer an opinion the entire movie. He simply asks that question of the so-called experts at universities, and they can't answer it. And a lot of people, I think, finally understood there's absolutely no foundation to this ideology. There's no truth underpinning it. And then these Boston Children's Hospital videos that I tweeted out later in 2022 went viral. The first one was about how they perform gender-affirming hysterectomies at the children's hospital.

Where they'll cut out your uterus. Sometimes they'll cut out the ovaries as well. So now these girls can never produce estrogen for the rest of their life. They're now a lifetime pharmaceutical patient no matter what. And no one could believe this was real. But also people would testify and perjure themselves and say these things don't happen too, right? Right. Yeah. So that video took off and I thought I'd better record this because it came from their own YouTube channel. And so I

recorded it and that night they deleted it. So I tweeted it again and I recorded 40 more videos. They deleted them all from their website. But that woke up a lot of people and it started a cascading effect of conservatives looking into other gender clinics. And it's completely changed the conversation. These legislators down the street here at the U.S. Capitol, they didn't want to touch this. I was meeting with some of them, with people from the Heritage Foundation and a couple other people and they were comfortable with the sports issue but not child transition just because they didn't understand it. So it's just been a process of education and when people get

educated on this it lights a fire inside of them and you can't put out that fire. They're just gonna learn more and that fire is gonna grow brighter and stronger and as I said when we started this it's simply a matter of how many children are harmed before we put a stop to this. You know you've obviously attracted a lot of attention in the process, I mean that indeed is part of your plan right? And but what about your family? Has anyone sort of tried to interfere with your family somehow? Yes, right away. People doxed my wife where she works. She's a teacher, she teaches grade four or five. Some trans activists, some men identifying as women to be exact, wrote online what school

she taught at, what class she taught at, the phone number to call the principal. And there's also a parent at that school that tried to get my wife fired, just because of what I say. But I'm an autonomous individual. I'm allowed to have a separate opinion from my wife. She doesn't talk about this. And so there's nothing they can do. They could try. I'd be happy to sue anyone who does try. But when people bully you, or they bully my wife in that case how do you deal with bullies well you push back I'm not just going to take it like if you come after my wife that's a completely different deal than coming after me so this one man who tried to

get her fired I did what men should do we're going to have a conversation about it so I found out where he worked and I drove to his place of employment, which turned out to be his apartment building. Now, I know the line that I shouldn't cross. I'm not going to bother someone at home. So I didn't do that. I did, however, write that I had gone to visit this person, and unfortunately, it was their home. I wrote that publicly.

This person, his name is Nicholas Berling, he then contacted the police who contacted me and right away this police officer was very aggressive to me as though I'd done something wrong because he'd only heard that guy's side of the story. Well 45 minutes later in that conversation the police officer said to me, Chris I would have done the exact same thing you did. And so he put a stop to that guy. He ended up making a bunch of TikTok videos and I received death threats for a couple weeks from all sorts of people. But guess what? He stopped. Another man tried to get my wife in trouble And I went and had conversations on a street in his community, where for three days,

he stalked me from afar. And then one day he drove by and he stopped and he threatened to kill me, he threatened to shoot me. And I got that on video. He got arrested and I finally got that guy a criminal record. So he's not even allowed to talk about me on social media anymore. So I did everything peacefully. I didn't even say a word to him. And he got himself a criminal record. So he's not even allowed to talk about me on social media anymore. So I did everything peacefully. I didn't even say a word to him.

And he got himself a criminal record. So I think they've learned, don't mess with my family because I'm going to push back, but I'm going to do it the smart way. In the very beginning, I wasn't recording conversations or anything. I was just out there. Maybe I would take a picture, but I was just talking to people and I was happy because I was reaching some parents, and I knew that they were going to be able to protect their own kids now because nobody knew what was going on. They didn't know what was in schools.

So let's talk about that too, about the role of schools in this. So it depends on the teacher you get. It depends on the administrator as well, what they're pushing. So I never say there's one solution for all of this. You shouldn't just take your kids out of school automatically. It depends on your kid. But children are being taught that they might have been born in the wrong body. And a lot of this is presented, maybe not directly, but it's part of an anti-bullying program. That some kids are trans, and of course we want to be inclusive and welcoming and support them. And yes, obviously we need to love all children, no matter what.

But this is indoctrination. and this is a social contagion so social media is the prime driver of all of this really started taking off around 2015 tumblr tiktok reddit all these kids are online but this the second biggest driver is for sure what's going on in schools because one teacher who believes in this and you you get these activist teachers, they can impact a lot of kids. And these schools also have these clubs, after-school clubs, lunch clubs, called gender and sexuality alliances, or whatever they call them. Where it's a lot of the troubled kids who end up going to these places. They'll give them free pizza. And these are awkward kids who maybe don't

have a lot of friends. And now they've found a group that loves them. And they take on this special identity of trans. And now they're treated as special. They're celebrated. The whole school is now using the alternate pronouns for them, going along with a lie. I like to talk about pronouns because I think people never fully comprehend how damaging it is to use the wrong pronouns for a child. What message are you sending when you call a girl he him? That message that you are telling that girl is that she needs to be something she's not. And from a position of authority as a parent. Or as a teacher or the administrator. But she's getting affirmed with this lie

that she was born wrong. And then thousands of times throughout the school year, it's getting reaffirmed every time those pronouns are used. What chance does this struggling 12-year-old have of backing out of that? None. They would have to admit to the whole school that they were wrong about this. Oh, and then face the backlash, I might add. And face the backlash, absolutely. So this is extraordinarily harmful. And teachers watching this should not go along with these lies. Do not do it. Evil to succeed never presents itself as evil.

All cults that people get sucked into, well, there's something attractive about it. There's some truth at the surface level. There's the love bombing that goes on. And for something that's evil to really prosper, it has to have a nice pleasant, fluffy surface level. And that's what this is. Empathy, kindness, understanding. Yeah, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what's really going on? Lies, deception,

and physical child abuse. That's the result of this. So instead of telling our kids that they're born in the wrong body, let's just tell them they're perfect just as they are. If they want to do something as an adult, that's a totally different conversation. Even then, 18, 19, 20 year olds, they should be screening for trauma, they should be screening for abuse, other mental health comorbidities, those should be taught first. But the fact of the matter is, if we just let these kids grow up and we stop teaching them that they might have been born wrong, this whole thing is going to die. And you're not going to end up with these 20 year olds who are caught up in this, because this is a cult that is spread all throughout society. It's a social contagion. And it's going to take some time to put this thing to bed and kill it completely, but we're going to do it.

It never disappears completely. There will always be true believers. But we will put a stop to this because it's too crazy to last. Chris, a final thought as we finish? For people watching this at home, they need to find some courage. They need to be positive. Instead of looking for reasons you can't do something, look for ways that you can, because I guarantee that they're out there. Yeah, and it could be as simple as strapping on a sign and walking outside, I suppose, right? I want to mention this because it's, of course, unorthodox.

And as you mentioned, it can appear silly. But I think as one person, you've made a profound difference. In a very, I might add, non-aggressive way, right? Yeah, it's working. It's low-tech. It's talking to people. As human beings beings we're supposed to talk to people face to face so that's all i'm doing and i'm i have faith in the goodness of humanity i have faith that other people are going to come along and help out and that's happening so

yes i've been a bit of a catalyst but there are other people like Tiffany Justice, Tina Deskovich of Moms for Liberty who are doing amazing work and they're extremely brave and courageous they take so much hate but I introduced this subject to Tiffany one night in a Twitter space I bumped into her first time I'd ever heard of Moms for Liberty and I told her what I was doing she believed in me right away and now there's a hundred and thirty thousand moms across the country fighting this. So that's an army of parents.

And we're not gonna be stopped because our children's lives matter more than our own. So if you're watching this, I suggest you get on board, reach out to some other group that's fighting this, reach out to me, go to a school board meeting, do whatever you can, but we gotta do something. It's like the laws of physics, An object in motion stays in motion. Well, Chris Elston, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

Thank you so much, Jan. Thank you all for joining Chris Elston and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.