Our Child First—Then Yours ｜ Todd & Krista Kolstad ｜ EP 428 (ts-lN22nzIg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ts-lN22nzIg

Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. 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. 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 us asked if our son could come into work and it all took off from there and 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. So hi everybody. I’m here with Todd and Krista Kohlstad today and they’re a couple from Northeast Montana who’ve had the misfortune to have their sleeves caught in the child protection services maw and 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 service at the doorstep of the Kohlstadts and to say things went downhill from there is to say almost nothing. 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 I’ll 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 has five children. Todd has five children. Okay okay and how long have you guys been married? We’ve been married seven years. Yes. And together about. Okay. Yeah. Now how are your children doing in general? Our the oldest daughter is in Canada. She moved away when she was over the age of 18. We have a daughter that’s in Kalispell area. We have a daughter that’s in the Navy, that’s a medic. She does fantastic in what she does and then we have a son in Canada that’s been with his mother the whole time. That one they’ve had a lot of problems I think. Hopefully he’s on track now and then we have our daughter. We have a daughter Jennifer that’s been with me her whole life. Every day I went to work I took her with. 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 and it’s Jennifer’s the daughter. Yes. That where difficulties emerged in 2021. And you were around then. Yes I was. Okay and so what was your view of what was going on with Jennifer in 2021? So in 2021 she was just 12, 12 and a half when the issue started. And you know she was a young girl. She had kind of come into puberty. She had struggles bullying and stuff. Her whole since about I came into her life when she was in I think second grade and she’d always been bullied in school. So it’s something we’ve always battled. So in 2021 she was about 12 and a half and people from the church started saying to us you know 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. And so we sat down with her and we said hey you know what is this about? What’s going on here? And she said well I think I want to be a boy. And we’re like okay. So we I 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? And as a girl that would probably be very very heartbreaking. You know the person that loves you the most didn’t has never wanted anything to do with you. And so we went over trauma and losses and things like that. And I was like how about if we go to counseling and you explore this with a counselor? Because she’s not going to listen to her parents. You know we don’t you know how it is with with younger kids. And anyway so I knew she wasn’t 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 so let’s delve into that a little bit. So Todd you said that you spent a lot of time with Jennifer. All life. Okay and you also both of you pointed out that she was bullied in school from a young age. So did she have friends at school or was she? Very few friends. Okay and did you have any sense of what it was that was attracting the attention of the bullies? 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. So the school we met with their counselors there and they said what the kids are doing to be mean are wrong but she’s bringing on herself with her actions. So she’s partly accountable too. And where we live now the school is fantastic. The counselors, the principal, the staff is just fantastic. And so she would come home and we’d find out that kids there told her to kill herself. And the school would require them to write a note saying you know apologizing. The school apologized and that’s how she was treated. But we would check her status every single day. Find out how every single day went with her. We’re proactive with the school and things were really good with her life. Well so what do you think was going on with regards to the stories she was telling? You made some mention of lying that she was doing at school and so what do you think was happening with that? It’s strange. We wanted that diagnosed. It wouldn’t just be lying. It’d 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 standpoint of how we got here there was never, through these years, there’s never been issues of transgender. There hasn’t been issues of any of that. It’s been lying. I think with school, just as a girl, I can say she’s always been super, super smart. Like always straight A’s, off the charts smarts. And I asked them do you think she could be on the spectrum somewhere and we’re looking at some things going on there but I’ve never got a diagnosis. Is she creative? Very, very creative. You see the reason I’m asking about that, well partly it’s the lies and I’m curious about that with regards to like an act of fantasy life let’s say. But it’s also the case that I believe that 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 have a more fluid identity because they’re creative. This is attractive to them and you also portrayed your daughter at school at least as a bit of an outsider and so one of the attractions of this gender ideology is that it gives kids who are outsiders and who are uncertain about their identity, you know, 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 were doing a good job? Yes. So where do you think she picked up these ideas about gender transition? Oh that’s easy. TikTok is one. I think there’s predators on there that lead kids that are more the outsiders into a specific direction. That’s a big one. And then there’s other kids already in that boat that are also seduced by those kind of things so to speak and so the church was telling us and her counselors that she’s running with a lot of those kind of kids is what we’re being told. Well and we had measures in place. Like she just didn’t have free reign of the internet. Like we had apps on that controlled where she could go and stuff but when she left our house, I know she was going to friend’s house who don’t have those measures in place. So she’s getting access to, you know, social media even though it’s not in our house. She’s still getting access to it. Right and these friends, like did you have any sense of who they were or what they were like? 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 and we tried to monitor that and monitor how her activities were with them and it’s a very tough balancing line with a once they hit 12. Right. Well the thing is kids of that age, they’re 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, well there is 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 expert 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. So and you thought in, did you see any changes in the way she was presenting herself that had? She’s always been a tomboy, never been, my husband owns a tech company and so she’s never been into girly things. She’s always been 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 interest say. Now that’s not completely unheard of among women obviously either 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 did you say? Robots and electronics and with my husband owning a computer company her and a bunch the techs all kind of raised their children together and you know they would take turns taking them to school and stuff so they’re 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, 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 what did she tell you? She started crying she was very very upset and very emotional and she said you know I just I don’t know what to do I I 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 and yeah yeah well I interviewed this woman Chloe Cole. I’ve heard of her. Yeah yeah well Chloe is a detransitioner and now an activist um 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 some something absolutely awful and she said to me well 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 you know 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 13 year old girls and that virtually everybody grows out of it and that the suffering that goes see the other thing that 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 and 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 you 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 right but instead she’s always been like the the kid in math club and the kid who goes to math competitions and wins and the kid who you know super super smart so she’s always struggled with that we all know cancel culture threatens free speech but do you think social media companies are innocent bystanders when they hide your channel from search results for 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extra three months of express vpn for free by visiting jordan’s special link expressvpn.com slash jordan that’s expressvpn.com slash jordan to protect your data today 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 and it’s also at that time later where that kind of intelligence and 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 not she’s upset she’s crying and she’s telling you that you know she’s pretty 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 was your qualifications it was through our church 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 what was the consequence of that everything was really positive during that whole time but what came out later she said they put it under her head which was again one of the crazy lies and she meant it literally so it was mixed and so but there was 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 it 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 she was she was what grade was she in it at that point seven yeah it started in that’s a rough grade so yeah yeah okay okay so she sees the counselor for about how long about six or eight months okay weekly and did you see any changes in her behavior anything like what was thing what were things like at home at that point that’s what it was so hard to analyze because i drove her to school or to the bus whichever she wanted just the best friend relationship i took her to school picked her up her life was happy if something did bad happened she would let me know it right you know she would let me know 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 the things things were good and you believed that the communication channels were open yes and you’re watching this i mean they have a very close relationship you’re watching this what do you think of the relationship between these two um you know what they they’re very close um she’s also very close to me because i’m the only mother figure she’s ever known so she actually calls me mom you’re the i’m her stepmom yeah and so we were very very close with her and very um open communication definitely okay um so what but again you have to remember we also have a child that has behavior 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 then it comes back to her life over here well that’s tricky too eh because you know you 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 they should be have they should have their 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’re 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 the kids in the middle who you know will experiment and and and cause a certain amount of trouble and trying to see where the limits are as teenagers and and so and that does imply that they pass 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 and 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 okay and what about her siblings what did they were any of her siblings around at that time as well she’s the last one in the house yeah and so um three of the older girls are kind of busy with their lives and you know they call maybe once a week or so and she she hasn’t spoken to her brother um who’s been with the 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 was correct okay okay she’s the only child in the house 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 with some trouble socializing and so what what’s the next event and so well two things what do you think is happening at school like 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 was did the school play a role in this school played actually no role in that yeah i i think in a very very small area um 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 earlier pronouns they would have shut it down immediately they wouldn’t have they wouldn’t have done that okay so this as far as you’re concerned this was something that was mostly occurring as a consequence of her of a particular peer group she was associating with and also information that she was obtaining online and you mentioned tik tok in particular was there a reason for that specific mention yeah because some of well 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 and these were some of the things she was posting and what sort of things was she posting well one time we were in for example we were in calispell she was in glasgow and she she had posted she’s in some kind of game and that her parents would beat her ass was her words and none of that we we were shocked when we saw that on her phone and she she said i don’t know why i do this i don’t know why i see so that was another manifestation of those fantastic fantasies and lies yes essentially right so she’s toying with being different a different person online so that’s the weird one of the weird things about the online world is because you can be any and we don’t know exactly know what this is doing to kids you can be anything you want online right because there’s no one there watching you there’s 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 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 no i’ve never seen anything like that it was more the the fantasy and the lies like she would say that she had a twin brother that her birth mom uh 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 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 she did gather a group of people from the trans community that gathered around her and was telling her you know 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 right but 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 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 and that’s certainly i would say something that’s the that the biden administration has been particularly complicit in producing and so 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 cleo told me that after a while too and i i know another girl who is in this situation too is you know 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 absolutely 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 back 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 they take on a life of their own like well like any lie does right right and 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 and other people exactly right okay so but but all things considered you too weren’t unduly concerned you had some concerns about about her popularity and about her storytelling that the teachers are they reporting any particularly unacceptable behavior at school during this time 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 right away because we’re concerned parents we interacted in the schools they’re just very good at interacting with with parents they’re they’re not woke they’re not all that and um but they were saying um 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 yeah but if she’s got a part to play in this too right it’s almost like if how can i put this like if i if i keep poking the top 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 yeah however yeah there was always a sense though and it’s simple what you said earlier um there’s always a sense that this is going to be a short little battle because her brain’s going to develop and she’s going to become a very smart girl and i had no doubt this is going to be a very successful young adult you know i never thought so there was never a sense of this is 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 a so you had confidence in her long-term outcome you absolutely because why absolutely why were you so certain of that because um if just given more time to grow up you know because kids hit 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 and she’s in an it 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 um 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 um right so you guys were still thinking that this was just yeah you were prepared to wait it out you’d had lots of children yes you’ve gone through this with many kids already one one one of one of my daughters initially didn’t 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 you know yes well it’s not it’s not uncommon and you could imagine too like you’ve characterized your daughter as somewhat of a tomboy yeah and i think that to some degree was confusing for tomboy’s 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 what they that meant was they had to surgically bring themselves into alignment with that right which is very very very very bad idea okay so all right so you’re going along with this situation and and you have some concerns but you believe they’ll reconcile themselves in the long run and so and then when when does think when do things break um i’ll let you tell most um we were coming back from billings montana from a medical appointment and um the location that our daughter worked had called and asked if our son could come into work and it all took off from there and there was nothing in the middle um there was just um 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 where she works where she’s known as a boy and it all and that was legal we did we made a decision we thought okay we don’t want to say nothing and i was i was bummed out i was very depressed about it we don’t want to say nothing we don’t want to ruin you know because school’s getting ready to start i wanted everything on a positive note and but yet she had been lying to us and lying about this about her and and how she had been working there a year no she’s been there only a few months okay okay a couple of months and what was she doing what was the job um it was at a local restaurant just a little little local dive restaurant right so she had gone there as a boy she no they all knew that she was female okay she went there and she presented this image that she’s transgender and that they needed to buy into this and call her by different pronoun and stuff and they were all kind of like uh i don’t really know what to do with this so they just played along with it are you tired of feeling sluggish run down or just not your best self take control of your health and vitality with balance of nature balance of nature 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i see i see they allowed her to go by leo i see so she started to now is it accurate to say that she started to take the persona that she was playing with online and now start to see 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 her job and um again that she was a boy and you know going by leo and stuff so it all came to a head on august 18th um 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 was 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 she obviously didn’t want to do that we also talked to her about hey you know they called and they said our son needed to come to work today and 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 at that day um okay so let’s let’s okay so so you guys you found out what she was doing at work and you suggested to her that she stopped the job temporarily and if things went well she could pick it up again in the winter essentially okay and 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 this personality and this fantasy that she began living she was now going to have to stop living good way to put that it was i think it was 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 right 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 starts 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 and 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 at work no no she did have a couple incidents where some people had 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 all the customers were really mean today you know and things like that right 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 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 she’s 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 that’s that what else is happening she just strange problems she started having really really bad headaches and she started having vision problems and we had full medical insurance we took her in for everything we’re having her eyes constantly checked she was going through um hair loss she was wanting to wear ball caps all the time she was um 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 just terrible headaches and so that was a concern that we’re having it was adding to the uh other you know 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 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 they are purchasable on amazon and you don’t have to prove that you’re 18 or anything you can just go in and and and buy them and um they were female to male hormones i i could look it up and send it to you the exact ones if you want but um so we found out that 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 every every one of the things that we said was listed effect and that’s if you’re taking the right doses and you’re you’re 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 afraid of that oh yeah jesus that’s brutal yeah because that 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 to her mental health or physical health generally speaking and looking back i could see things like she’s not she was acting like more aggressive like really quick to anger um you know her her skin her complexion just went terrible like and i took her to the doctor i was ordering her 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 okay so now she’s off to high school so so continue the story what happened on august 18th um what had happened is we had a discussion with her about stopping the job and starting high school and starting fresh and um 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 she talked to us and stuff but then she’d be snippy you know and go back to her room typical teenager behavior so it 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 so i stayed on the phone with the police officer i walked down the hallway to where she was and i and who reported that i’m sorry who reported the text messages the other child that she made these the child reported do you think the child did that of her own accord or was that a plan or were their parents involved i think that’s 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 so yes 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 yeah so the the police officer like i said he called i went down the hallway and i talked to jennifer and and she was she was in a room but the door was open and i was like hey you know what’s going on the cops are on the phone like 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 and yeah 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 every and i told the police officer i’m like i i don’t think i 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 this year he didn’t ask for me to hand her the phone none of that happened so at this point so how many people from child services just one lady just one lady and so at this point we’re like okay well this has never happened before and this is weird and you’re really taking it back when you know now you’re in trouble yeah you’re like what did i do what’s going on around here so we were 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 to 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 proclivity if if 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 not to 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 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 who has some problems that we’re addressing and then they’re going to go about their day and that’s not what happens okay so you’re showing this person around your house we showed her what’s the interaction like with the person she was friendly she was nice i mean yeah our home is very stocked very nice home our daughter spoiled rotten for technology in her room the report was that she had taken 30 ib profan and drank well that’s we haven’t gotten there yet so what happened then she said she had to talk to jennifer alone yeah and we were at that point we were like wow this is getting really yeah but we said okay you can talk to her alone and they went out on the porch they spoke for about 10 minutes and then todd and i went out on the porch because we’re like we’re just not comfortable with 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 ib profan earlier in the day at about three o’clock 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 ib profan and stuff were and i know she hadn’t taken any you know she hadn’t had any squirreled away i knew she hadn’t done it but we were like we 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 okay well we’ll continue tell 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 she does yes okay so all of you are going to the hospital so we transport our daughter with us and this what sort of what sort of mood is your daughter in at the moment at that moment nobody spoke we weren’t really speaking we’re really 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 right so now you also don’t know like this fantasy that came out about the ib profan 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 as they start dwelling on fantasies and 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 and like you just have no idea how much of that dreamlike world she’s allowing to occupy her imagination right because it’s isn’t surprising eh because you say well you were having a perfectly as far as you could tell a perfectly normal day a happy day even she’s 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 that’s pretty bloody brutal starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to shopify it’s easier than ever shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million 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and everyone here needs to call me leo and the whole room was just kind of like crickets like there 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 this so 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 yeah like seriously playing with fire so our reaction was um you know she’s done this before we’re not okay with it 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 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 social and now do you know did you know then 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 the hospitals 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 what happened that is what jesus so we were we were at the hospital for five days um 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 we were like okay so the whole time i’m going to the hospital for five six hours a day because i don’t her birth mother abandoned her and even i’m her primary mother figure now and i don’t want her to feel like just because you’re acting up and you’re being bad we’re gonna 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 we’re this is 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 birth name you know i’m getting a lot of rolling their eyes and signing 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 and then so almost right away there was one aid that sat outside her door because now she’s on 24-hour supervision so she’s in a door and the aid sits about like right there in that doorway away from her just to watch her so right so she’s getting a lot of attention a lot of attention daughter’s in the middle right and then i’m kind of on the other side of the room there so right away the aid starts saying things to her about how this particular aid herself is non-binary and is going to go have top surgery and oh boy 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 to 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 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 so and if your daughter happens to have to be dragged along for the ride well they’re proving their moral superiority no they’re they’re more than okay with that that’s just part of the fun so oh yeah all right so now you’re 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 big the biggest thing is that right immediately 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 that 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 and why does that emerge as a discussion they said she needed acute psychiatric care because of the the statement she was making about killing herself and we were like okay and they said it would be inpatient so god we’re saying okay like we’re 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 like a secret language if that if that makes sense between our daughter well they said they said it like this because 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 show 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 the centerpiece of that is casper well and of course lurking behind all this is your your daughter’s unwillingness in all likelihood to go to high school because this gives her an out jesus yeah terrible and so at that point um you know we like todd said he had his phone we looked up wyoming and we said to the doctor to the doctor and the social worker outside the room because i was very careful not to have these conversations in front of her because i 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 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 what’s supposed to happen and i’ll never forget our cps worker said to me she said oh don’t worry about wyoming those the chances of that happening are so slim and we’ll all have a conversation and work through it together if that’s if that’s what’s on the table yeah and when she’s when that got said you could see immediate discomfort in our daughter like she had just been betrayed and you could see almost uh 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 there’s covert planning going on behind the scenes yeah and i told her that right away we left i said i said they are going to send her to wyoming that’s what i so um five days go by because they 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 this billings inpatient um psychiatric care and that’s four hours from us so if we’re expected to visit or take things down so well so let me ask you about this because as far as as far as you guys are concerned your your daughter apart from her texts was not showing any signs of suicidality right no no no and and never has she’s not suicide as a matter of fact she’s always been like any self-harm any cutting anything like that no she had one incident and the and cps jumped on this incident where i walked in her room and she had a scratch on her arm and she had a counseling appointment the next day and i was like did you scratch yourself did you do that yeah and she tried to tell me oh no the cat did it and i was like okay but i took a picture of it anyways and to this day i have that picture and i sent it to her counselor because she was going to counseling the next day and i said i just found this on jennifer’s arm what should i do should i how should i ask should i be concerned do i punish her like what does someone do in this situation and he said thanks for sharing it with me i will review it with her tomorrow in counseling but again it was a scratch it wasn’t a big bloody there’s no pattern here no okay now but now despite the fact that she’s not showing she’s not depressed she’s not suicidal as far as you guys can tell she claimed that she was she’s acting out that’s for sure but now the psychiatric community has decided that she’s in such a dire condition that she needs inpatient treatment for her suicidality right now they’re undoubtedly covering their ass so to speak and going by the book and have also decided that you’re evil parents in in the offing but what are you thinking about given that your daughter is now being pulled into the well into the workings of this system i mean i obviously you want to be cooperative so but what and you’re concerned obviously that there’s maneuvering going on behind the scenes what are your thoughts in this situation i thought the one thing that could come out of this that might be good i said now that she’s in a bubble with them the same problem we were just having they’re about to get the focus of it they’re going to start seeing what we see and they did right away cps and we were hoping that we could get a diagnosis based on that you know based on if she goes in their care and starts telling these crazy lies and stuff i see i see i see some kind of diagnosis of what was going on with her the cps during that exact time cps even called and demanded that we turn over her cancer treatment records we said she never had cancer and then did they ever offer you a diagnosis that was associated with her tendency to lie never never the diagnosis we’ve been given has been um adhd pts there are i can’t tell you because you’re not my clients but there are diagnosis that are specific to the behaviors that she’s manifested that you should have been told about and that’s what i was thinking like there definitely it’s clear so if had they known what they were doing and being paying attention you would have received a diagnosis because i like i i’ve been building it in the back of my mind as you guys have been telling me the story and to this day we still won’t have a diagnosis on the lying they just said well sometimes you tell stories i’m like not like this that’s not so that’s so appalling yeah this is not someone who sometimes tells stories these are outrageous things like a ghost hovering over her bed to um the cancer thing and then it was a sister that died it was one thing after another okay yeah so we get to a point where um august 22nd they told us she was next in line for a bed in wyoming or i’m sorry montana and um so we were like okay so we leave the hospital we go to dinner that night and then again about 7 38 o’clock the hospital calls us and it was a doctor from the hospital and he said um a bed has opened up in wyoming and she needs to go and we were like yeah we were just what you know how did this happen we were told billings earlier today and there’s nothing worse than being proved right when you’re apprehensive yeah okay so now it’s wyoming and so he said well she she has to go we’re not doing her any good here she can’t just sit here forever and i said i understand that but we were told she was next line for a bed in billings we thought we had just a little bit of time and so the call ended and within 10 minutes cps showed up at our house with the police officer and removed her from our care they gave us paperwork saying that we were unwilling or unable to provide medical care for her and that’s that’s not true at all and so so what okay so what did you make of that it said child neglect they’re saying that that act of not providing or not being able willing and able to provide medical okay now was that based on your objection to her being moved to wyoming yeah only that she had only i see because so they told you she was going to billings then they told you she was going to wyoming you weren’t very happy about that and then they used that as evidence that you weren’t willing to provide her with appropriate care and that’s when they took her from you correct exactly they called it recommended we were declining her recommended health right that’s the way they worded that oh yes oh man so there’s a there’s a great setup for you so this was pre-planned she was going to wyoming absolutely you know why it was pre-planned because they didn’t go through the court all that was pre-printed it was they got there in 10 minutes 10 minutes you know i mean 10 minutes from the time that we got off the phone to the time that you arrived at my house the police and they said you guys can’t talk to her again until we say you can’t talk to her you can’t call her you can’t see her yeah how old is she at this point 14 oh my god so now she’s fallen completely into the hands of the demented social workers exactly so then the next day which was august 23rd after they told us we couldn’t see her anything they had somebody an employee from children’s services um transfer her to wyoming but on the way there she was allowed to stop yeah she was allowed to stop and visit her friends she was allowed to go to her summer job after we were told that we couldn’t see her speak to her they made all these stops around town and visited with all these people before they left she could tell them that she was she could tell them that she was transgender suicidal and and her parents were abusing her and i’m like i don’t care what people think of me in the town but she’s a child i mean they should have protected her what if you know when she’s 20 she’s over all of this and is in a different place in life and now what did you let her do you know what just happened there are you struggling with back taxes or unfiled returns this year the irs is actively escalating collections by adding 20 000 new agents in these challenging times your best defense is to use tax network usa along with hiring thousands of new agents and field officers the irs has kicked off 2024 by sending over five million pay up letters to those who have unfiled tax returns or balances owed these guys are not your friends don’t waive your rights and speak with these agents independently without backup tax network usa a trusted tax relief firm has saved over one billion dollars in back taxes for their clients and they can help you secure the best deal possible whether you owe ten thousand dollars or ten million they can help whether it’s business or personal taxes whether you have the means to pay or on a fixed income tax network can help resolve your tax burdens once and for all seize control of your financial future now and don’t let tax issues overpower you contact tax network usa for immediate relief and expert guidance call 1-800-245-6000 or visit tnusa.com slash peterson turn to tax network usa and find your path to financial peace of mind that’s tnusa.com slash peterson so we’re pretty upset about that so she goes to wyoming yeah pretty upset i bet you were how upset extremely they were just destroying burning all of her bridges there and it’s like they were intentionally just burning all the bridges to her family so how are you making sense of this because now not we’re just totally kind of we’re mad we’re upset you know we’re hurt our daughter’s just been ripped away from us like it is our whole world was just kind of spinning felt like we’re up against the devil that’s what it felt like i feel like that’s the face of the devil that’s what i thought yeah that’s what the devil is it was and so okay so why and so why did you why did you why did it appear to you why did those appear to be the relevant terms to you do you think because she’s a child she’s a child when i was a child i could not make any such decisions but i i’m glad my mom and dad were there to tell me no you know yeah and that’s particularly true when you’re like 13 to 15 boys if you if you’re able to you can imagine staking your life on the stupidest decision you made when you were 13 my god you’d be in such terrible shape absolutely yeah and i couldn’t believe that they could do these things that was so i we’ve never been involved in this system before we’ve never dealt with yeah well you’re fortunate in that boy once you get your sleeve caught in the child welfare machine you are in you are in serious trouble now we know yeah yeah well i can tell okay so now she’s off now so you can see too they’re letting her stop off with all her friends and to say goodbye they’re showing her just how much they are on her side yes right so now that’s the substitution for the parents it’s like well your parents don’t care for you they’re abusing you look at how nice we are to you we’ll give you everything you could possibly want and more oh yeah one of the attorneys involved in our case a smart thing he said they took your daughter and they taught her how to weaponize the system and now you know you’ve got a super smart kid who has learned that she can get what she wants just by saying a few keywords and what do you think since august 18th those are those are her keywords i’ll kill myself if you don’t let me yeah you know i mean she has like now she knows so how do you how do you work around there come back for that i don’t know but she did go to wyoming she was there for a month while she was in wyoming we were given very little information but we did email them constantly and say things like we want to make sure she’s not being called leo we want to make sure you’re not letting her live as a boy we’re not okay with oh yeah you want to make sure that you’re not transitioning her and um you know no men’s products because that was another thing at the first hospital i started giving her men’s hygiene products to use even after i was like no i’ll bring her stuff from home she doesn’t need old spice you know she is and so so what were they tell what were they doing and what were they telling you they they told us that they’re going to do what the patient needs them to do to get well they said therapeutically they had to meet her where she was and if she was a boy right now they had to meet her as a boy and i was like i’m not yeah well they’re basically man it depends on the state but they were likely mandated by law to do that i mean i know in canada for example under the dictates of so-called gender affirming care that therapists are punished it’s it’s a punishable offense for a therapist not to affirm the stated gender of a minor yeah even if you had some even if there were some sensible therapists there and those are becoming very hard to find by the way the probability that they would be able to go against her stated wishes in an institutional setting even if they thought they should is low right because that’s that’s what exactly what the and these bills that ban so-called conversion therapy they’re aimed precisely at ensuring that a child who’s possessed by an evil whim as is the case in your daughter and then being egged on by narcissistic and cowardly psychopaths the therapists are and physicians for that matter are required by law to continue with the lie right and so everyone who’s watching and listening should know that too so you bring your child who’s has gender dysphoria and associated conditions to a therapist or a medical professional at your peril right and theirs too and so what i mean what do you do how do you treat these kids but i mean so she stays in wyoming for a month and they bring her back to the state of montana and at that point she went into a group home called it was run by an agency called youth dynamics and at the group home they socially transitioned her they allowed her to be called leo he him and what had they done in wyoming on that in that regard were they were the same thing right so she’s well on the pathway so she’s on the path now so right she’s surrounded by people who are also bolstering her story that you guys aren’t to be trusted that you’ve alienated her that you likely abused her that the fact that you wouldn’t go along with her true identity means that you’re not to be trusted all of that yeah yeah and so now that’s where that’s where we have her she’s very very angry yeah you know and more of the the manipulation and the lies and stuff are coming up and um and what sort of lies are you seeing at that point they were they were actually like we mentioned earlier she had already turned their sights on them so cps would call and say that your daughter jennifer just told me off just cuss me out on the phone and she said there’s apparitions floating around and those kind of things the same stuff was starting all right she had called cps a call she said you’re in a call and i’m never coming back to glasgow because i’m not going to live in your call and just yeah more of right of what she was doing before only on a bigger scale limit pushing yeah well and one thing during both the wyoming time and at first it seemed like a coincidence but it just kept going on and on we were given the wrong contact information to her where she was at in wyoming cut off and every number we’d be given we couldn’t contact her and then when they moved her again it was the same problem all over again that did happen yeah strange how we’re given the wrong number everywhere yeah right strange absolutely that’s exactly the kind of behind the scenes manipulation you’d expect from people who are narcissistic psychopaths yeah even even the court appointed attorney’s numbers we were given were completely wrong and they gave them out of country phone numbers for her and i yeah so we didn’t so they didn’t even start interacting in it until weeks into it we okay so she’s in in wyoming for a month then she comes back to montana now she’s in this group you said she’s in a group home and run by youth dynamics and and so what and they’re they’re continuing with the transition and so what are you i imagine you did some background research on that group what what what did you find out about them um they they’re in a very woke area of our of our state you know montana’s pretty broken up yeah um but the area that they are is particularly woke okay and what do you mean by that exactly and how did you know that um well they allowed they believe that you can transfer your gender when you want like today i want to be a girl oh tomorrow i’m going to be a boy so call me this name and then some of the other things that they believe in and that they kind of tout are just not our beliefs okay well we can leave it at that that’s fine that’s fine and so in this group home she’s allowed to 100 socially transition she is called leo she’s been given a chest binder oh yeah she’s allowed to wear men’s clothes straight down to the boxer shorts i mean everything yeah and so we would visit she’s 14 14 she shaved her head so she had like this really masculine you know haircut um at the school program which was run by an agency called new day she was allowed to be in all the boys groups and present herself as a boy at school and right now she’s in a different school right and how do you have any idea how life at that school is working out for her we went down there together to see her and everything was great the visit was great she seemed excited about coming home like when can she come home the visit was fantastic however um she was um you can see being socially transitioned but pieces of who she really was was a parent like like you could tell she missed being with us okay so you went to visit when she was still in the group home twice and the second time we went i went for a long walk with her in the back and she said she don’t know why she tells these lies she was like i can’t wait to come home and it was i was almost in tears i was i was crying she said i can’t wait i want to come home i’m so sorry for the problem i’ll never do these things again right and i i promised her that well you can imagine that there’s a part of her you know imagine her split in some ways into two parts and so there’s the part that’s new that’s that’s excited about her new identity and attracting all this attention and toying with this idea and these fantasies so that’s the fantasy world and then there’s that true part of her that’s like pining like mad for her actual life and missing i mean how long has she been away from you guys now um at that the august uh we’re looking at like october november right so number of months and she’s 14 and so all of this hospitalization everything descended on her with the same rapidity that it descended on you with even more disruption because at least you guys got to go home and you had each other and all of a sudden she’s like and she’s in serious no-man’s land and we knew we were in trouble though when we went to dinner because it went so good that the place that where she was being housed at they were all excited how good everything just went again and we’re supposed to come back and take her to dinner that night so we were all excited about that and she was excited and then they called us about an hour before that and said cps and glasgow called and they said absolutely not the parents are not allowed to be alone with her they were like wow how the hell did they find out every every time things would be where she wanted to come back home the things were good cps would step in and block it do you have any idea who was doing that and why the counselor yeah the counselor the one that didn’t come to your house yeah the one um the one at the group home so in the group home they have like an in-house counselor that she saw so you think that counselor was contacting cps yes absolutely yeah because he was saying you know when the parents are here they they will only call her jennifer they won’t call her leo oh yeah yeah and and that you could tell it was upsetting those people there’s a special place in hell for him yeah so you could tell that they were they were not happy with us even though we’re very polite to them but we wouldn’t buy into it you know we’d be like okay jennifer show us your room okay jennifer let’s look at not leo we would never say leo you know and then and i even told her i’m like the haircut looks really masculine is that the look you were going for and she was kind of like you know so things like that continue to go on okay okay so all right so now she’s in the group home and hypothetically she’s going to come home what does happen so during this whole time we’re having monthly court meetings um to see so the judge could be just see where we’re at you know where cps was at with everything and everyone has a lawyer todd had a lawyer i had a lawyer assigned to me our daughter has a lawyer assigned to her cps has a lawyer then there’s a casa guardian there’s all these people and so almost every court thing was about a half hour long and during that they all kind of talked to each other you know i’m like are we going to get to the point here like shouldn’t we be talking about our daughter and what’s going on with her not what you did last weekend because i don’t care you know and so um it finally our public defenders told us just keep your head down play nice and at the end of this group home program which is about six months you’ll have your daughter back in your care yeah and then you can go on with your life so we were like okay well it all came to a head because finally we’re like no we’re not okay with this we don’t want to play nice anymore we don’t want to do any of these things anymore and at that point um this was on january i believe it was january the guardian came over yeah the 19th well the guardian came over in october but on january 19th basically cps wanted to step out of the case and um place our daughter with her birth mother who now lives in canada with her new husband probably not probably important not to skip past the guardian coming in october yeah the reason that’s important is that’s when we knew what the game was okay the guardian tell me about the guardian the guardian lied him came to our house it was a very pleasant meeting she was and who is this guardian state appointed yes guardian of your child yeah and okay she comes to meet with you okay meeting went great we sat in the kitchen visited everything was great very friendly very comfortable with her and when we’re walking out she stopped and she said i need to know what’s this going to look like you raising having a transgender child yeah and are you are you gonna if you’re not gonna agree to call her by her preferred pronouns and raise her as a boy then you’re not gonna like what i have to say in court yeah that’s what she said that was her party so much for the niceness i was blown away oh yeah and i figured that’s just exactly and she even brought us an article that said how we should we should be supportive like we should use the pronouns that she wants and i was like no i said i don’t i don’t need your article we’re good pamphlets on how to raise a transgender child the whole bit no no you guys were no and you were either going to go along with the lie or you’re going to get like raked over the coals yeah that was the game so and all the niceness is there just so the people who are doing it don’t have to face who they actually are yes yes so what happened was we released our video that was 17 minutes long saying this is what we’ve gone through with the system okay tell me about that when when did you do that january 17th okay you released it where um i released it on youtube and facebook and facebook so what made you decide to do that we had no choice we’re at the end of our line i see you transitioned our daughter you’re destroying our lives we’re just going to make everything transparent public and we’re going to take our chances because everything that we’ve talked about so far we were not allowed to even breathe a word of in court everything that’s been said so far they what do you mean you weren’t allowed to our anything we would tell the court court appointed attorneys but we just told you and we talked about so far and none of it would come out in court why we have no idea we’d have to sit there and just shut up they would talk and none of it would ever come out how did you control your temper um it was more shock all that’s oh yeah i was pinching him under the table i’m not serious about this because i’m very well i’m very well oh yeah she keeps me out of shit but it was hard well you said no i think i think you i think your answer is good that you were so shocked that that that you didn’t actually know what to do well i’m sure that’s true absolutely you think this is like being in a movie right right and we couldn’t believe that they would sit there and say things that were completely the opposite of the truth and even things we would point out saying okay this is a outright lie you have this completely backwards and they say we know it can’t be changed though that was there for instance like on the affidavit they submitted an affidavit to court and it says you know we weren’t providing housing clothing food and all this stuff and we said hey you were at our house and in this report over here that you made says our house was clean well stocked and no dangers we were told oh well that’s a template that we use for affidavit oh i see oh that’s very convenient for you guys but it’s listed it’s in the record anybody if you saw that you how would you know i mean you it looks like we’re these terrible people who live in squalor and run like a meth den or something you know with this poor kid in it and that’s not true at all wow wow okay okay so you’ve had enough by january 19th i bet you’ve had january 17th you released a 17 minute video on youtube and what do you you you tell what tell our story in very good faith we don’t use any names none of that at all yes we didn’t mention it and where did you release it um i put it on youtube as well as facebook on on your just on your social media yes i see so it’s just a local thing essentially and what happened it started to catch fire and um the next so that was on 17th on the 18th our daughter’s attorney filed a motion in court that said they have to take their video down and they’re not allowed to talk about anything yes and so this was on the 18th and so i was like okay i i see your motion they emailed it to me so i was like i don’t know how serious do i take this i don’t know so on the 19th we go to court and the judge for this yeah for this so it’s that fast two days later and so the court system can move pretty quickly when they need when they want to but before this is important lead up to there’s plenty of witnesses to this too and we were told prior to that the purpose of this is the judge is going to put you in your place the attorney said that to us about eight times we kept her journey um the our public defense yeah they said they said you’ve really made this judge mad she’s going to put you in your place over and over yeah over and over she’s gonna she’s going to really come at you you shouldn’t have done that we’re glad you did in one way guys but on the other way you really shouldn’t have done that in the video and so um when we got to court on the 19th cps wanted out of the case they wanted to place jennifer with her birth mother in canada and they just wanted they want out of the case that was getting too hot i think it’s getting it’s getting too much attention and too hot i see so it’s just time to foist her off somewhere else yes so what they did was um the judge and the judge and the attorneys intervened and they said well what have you done to investigate this mom in canada who hasn’t been with this child in seven years hasn’t really spoke to her hasn’t seen her how have you done and they said well we got a background checked so then they were like okay well she’s in kichner ontario so in the other providences if she got in trouble would it show in kichner and they’re like probably not so he the judge was like i want you to do more looking into the birth mom and making sure it’s an appropriate okay so so let me separate these you have a court case for january 19th about your about your video this case that you’re referring to is separate from that nope it all happened at the same time oh i see okay okay so the judge was going to put you in in your place but also was attending to the safety of your daughter in relationship to this transfer okay okay yeah so it’s like a dual she addressed it a couple issues in that i see and she told us that day the judge said that we needed to accept that reunification with our daughter wasn’t going to be what we were expecting that it was going to be that she probably didn’t live with us but we had the chance to rebuild a relationship with her is what she said to us yeah and regarding the video too the judge never watched the video had never seen it the judge even admitted that court never watched it didn’t even want to take the time to watch it and she did ask the county attorney if he had watched it and he nothing alarming they didn’t use any names and unless there’s other copies that are longer and there wasn’t there’s only the one but nobody so what did they tell you had to do we got 10 we remove it right now you got 10 minutes or you go to jail on what grounds contempt of court oh yeah so we had to do that but what but what had you done wrong before the contempt of course nothing nothing i see so if you didn’t take it down that was contempt of court but there was no reason that you had to take it down apart from that as far as you can tell no it was there was done in taste it was done very polite it was so did she offer any explanation at all for her just anger and put us in our place nope yeah scream wow so okay now so now you’ve you’ve lost your daughter and you’ve been through the through the social work meat grinder and legal meat grinder and now you make this public because you actually have the right to freedom of speech and all you did was tell the truth and apparently you annoyed a judge for reasons that you don’t understand and they told you that you either take it down or you’re going to go to jail that’s the situation exactly oh yeah so so that’s fun so what are you thinking about your place in the world at this point we’re blown away by that because the it was so simple we see other people put way more stuff up we did not name our child and they also their attorney the attorney for our daughter that was she’s very woke was said um um he said he was born he lives in glasgow in the in the video i said um i’m from glasgow montana you said i was born there i said i was born in glasgow montana and i’ve lived in montana much of my life so that was a big crime they said that was a big one because then everybody can figure out where our daughter’s from so we thought that’s on everybody’s facebook profiles already right um that’s a crime so we we took the video we did take the video down in the 10 minutes you have to this is a friday and i don’t really want to sit in jail over the weekend which i know was her intent and so i’m like okay so i took the video down but somebody else had already copied it and released it on rumble and other places and i don’t know who did that um right so it’s it’s just caught fire from there and that’s kind of what landed us here so currently our our daughter who’s 14 is in canada with her birth mom we have great concerns about that because i’m not sure if if you got to see the letter so all throughout the girls lives um we had three of the girls in our care when they were minors and i had them in counseling right away because they told me horror stories about this birth mother and terrible things that supposedly happen so as soon as i married todd i put them all in counseling one of those counselors wrote a letter stating that if um the birth mother wanted to be reunited with jennifer that she needed to go through unit reunification therapy have visits all the claims that the kids had made needed to be looked into so right from the get-go i gave cps those letters from that counselor back in 2017 i think it was maybe 18 and they were like well she’s not doing that now and i’m like well no she’s not doing that now because she hasn’t seen our daughter in seven years yeah so we don’t know they didn’t care they don’t care so we don’t know what’s going on no you definitely have them confused with people who cared yeah quite the contrary yeah right right and so that’s where she is now and so what’s what do you guys face now practically and legally into the future so when was the last time you were in communication with your daughter not in probably over a month now it’s been a while and that’s because we had the weekly where we talked to talk on a webcam with her with a counselor right so that’s monitored so we haven’t had that anymore at all and also her sisters who loves her her sister is in the navy loves her to death and um they cps block communication with her too so she cannot talk to her so now is your communication with your daughter blocked yeah blocked and then also during this time well they’ve had her too my like her grandparents that aren’t blocked they they kept forgetting over and over over they kept saying it was an oversight that she wasn’t allowed to call them and wasn’t on the call list and we would keep going through the the attorneys and they were so what do you think what do you think is in the offings for your daughter is she living as leo at the moment yes 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 in canada she can get you know the double mastectomy and stuff i don’t know what’s available to her anything and 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 if you want to say grow out of this phase or come around from this phase she’s 14 80 percent of kids or more really grow out of it by 18 yeah and at that point 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 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 yeah well you can say that again montana we found out just recently leads the u.s. according to an article on child takeaways by cps that is the capital of it in the whole united states montana so how do you guys reconcile yourself with your 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 and you’re lucky like well you guys weren’t lucky it think you know things really got out of hand for you but anybody whose life isn’t destroyed by that completely is is fortunate so so now you’re in you’re in a dire situation and so is your daughter like what’s your next move and what’s your status legally like so because you guys like you you weren’t supposed to put up this video but yeah here you are talking to me so my my suspicions are this is going to make you very popular no so one of the lawmakers that actually passed the law said what that they’re 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 took 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 you’re in contempt of court for what we’re not supposed to speak about our case or anything like that at all again everything that we so why are you because i keep telling people our family has been destroyed there’ll never be a family unit of krista todd and jennifer again where that is done our life that way as we know it is destroyed but 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 another family willing to take that risk because it’s the right thing to do for one and for another we 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 exactly when did when did the u.s 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 it’s going to be more to you more it is and 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’ve already taken our child that’s right that’s right what’s next that’s exactly right you’re going to take my house well i would also say like you you you’re your best determination is to go out with guns blazing and that’s where we’re at right absolutely make absolutely every bit of this as public as you possibly can right and and assume even if you get nailed on wednesday if you get nailed for contempt which you likely will um 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 things not quite as dire as what you’re going through but um your silence is what’s required exactly yeah and and you have the weapon of your voice right and if we’re quiet then we’re we’re helping the system how is that helping another family it’s not or you for that matter or you i mean yep 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 we are open to that yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well that would be the best possible case scenario and you know what your daughter is 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 what 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 wednesday yes and we have a first amendment attorney involved you know 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 yeah so with any luck that will actually protect you in canada the situation is much worse we we have a charter of rights but that bloody thing is 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 and uh well those two in particular for whatever reason they deem reasonable so but you do have first amendment protection in the u.s. so my suspicions are if you keep fighting this that you’ll probably win how are you affording this we have a give-and-go um yeah you know i mean we’re trying to rally and to raise money we at one point not to jump backwards but at one point we were told um you know cps has a budget of like 3.5 million dollars 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 and 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 you bet it’s time to transition you no the answer is no this is no way that’s not going to happen you go and record it they did they actually did uh want us to go to counseling to learn how to raise that they want me to go to counseling in the united in canada too to be educated yeah no like no and so they said we have to yeah yeah no i understand i understand yeah so they’re saying no you 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 if you told me you were a unicorn i i don’t have to go to counseling to accept that i didn’t tell you that before this started it’s 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 so are 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 yeah that’s not the goal that is definitely not the goal and they’re not open to it at all that is not the goal the goal is 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 it will cause you a lot of pain along the way right that’s the goal make no mistake about it yeah well good luck with your court case keep me posted we will um 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 you know 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 to do well we were told by we were told by an attorney before we walked out here that um the press is filing action to be in the courtroom on wednesday because they 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 they’re trying to do that and at this point i think the judge said no so monday monday is the court holiday as you monday is the court holiday so on tuesday the press has lawyers that are going to file now being a little um 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 there’s a they’re not playing by the same rules though we have the governor’s office making comments about us that are wrong yeah and not only that you guys are way outside the domain of rules yeah we were this is no man’s land and war oh yeah you’re way outside the rules we’ve been accused of having like meth labs and um living in squalor and and all kinds of stuff like that if you’re going to have a meth lab you might as well live in squalor you know you might like we were out for dinner we were actually out for dinner while see well they um had our daughter and this is um we had one of the the staff members from the hospital we think it’s one of the nurses that evidently interviewed our daughter or something actually approached us in front of a crowded we’re at a crowded place out for dinner and started raising our voice and saying we should have we and they called her by name and we should have allowed her to transgender that we should have promoted that we should have after on what she wanted and everybody heard it now they did suspend have you had have you had okay so let’s end with this let’s end this section i’m going to continue talking um 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 um about well 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 and so um join us for that join us for that okay so i do have one question for you well you know you guys have been under a lot of pressure yes to admit to your to the wrongdoing that you’ve committed right the the um the fact that you didn’t abide by your daughter’s demands the fact that your 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 it’s like 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 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 you know that’s yeah there’s hell is a bottomless pit because no matter how bad it is there’s some stupid something somebody can do to make it worse and so yeah yeah this is well you you’ve definitely seen a long way into the abyss but there’s many layers below that if you really want to visit them so and silence definitely increases the probability that those additional layers will make themselves manifest so i mean we’re already pretty far down the rabbit hole right once we’ve got to the point where the state can take your child on the grounds of your abuse to mutilate castrate and sterilize them and to claim that that’s virtuous right that’s that’s a long way down the rabbit hole but there’s more distance yet to go so yeah brutal well i’m very sorry to hear what’s happened to you that’s and congratulations on your courage that’s rare way rarer than you think way rarer than you want think most people they 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 rather being contempt of their courts and god’s court though yeah well that’s right that’s for sure that’s right all right well to everybody watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention to the film crew here today appreciate your help day where data wire plus people for making this conversation possible that’s much appreciated as well