This episode of my podcast is accompanied by an essay for context. Read until the end for the links of where to find and support my incredible guests.
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The moment a parent says “no” to their child’s gender transition, they don’t expect that the next knock on the door could be from Child Protective Services.
A few years ago, if someone had told me that in the United States, a parent could lose custody of their child for refusing to affirm a new gender identity, I would have assumed they were exaggerating.
I was under no illusion that the system was perfect. But, like most Westerners, I had a certain minimal degree of trust there were still basic guardrails within social services which ensured that kids were protected from genuinely abusive situations rather than flagrantly kidnapped from their families due to ideological disagreements.
In a sane society, one would presume that the disagreement over a child’s stated gender identity would be treated as a family matter, a therapeutic matter, maybe even a painful conflict… but not as something that could end with the state taking your child away.
Then I started meeting people whose stories suggested otherwise.
Today’s video is one of those stories.
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I’m Maia Poet. I’m 26. I’m a detransitioner.
Most of what I do now- writing, public speaking, and coaching families through complex situations like these- has grown out of one simple realization; that the path into transition is rarely as straightforward as it looks from the outside, and the institutions surrounding it are often far more powerful than the families caught inside them.
In this conversation, I’m joined by my friend Jonni, a 23-year-old detransitioner I met at a Genspect conference last fall. Jonni was medically transitioned at 13 after just a single therapy appointment and a single endocrinology visit. His mother was warned that refusing gender treatments could mean her son’s suicide… or even the possibility of authorities stepping in to find a more “supportive home.” That sentence stayed with him.
For that reason, after a nearly six hour Spaces conversation on X, I decided to invite Jonni as a cohost, and Ellie as a guest for this conversation.
Ellie is a Ukrainian immigrant who came to the United States in 2007 believing she was building a safer, freer future for her family in California. Instead, she found herself in what she describes as a 20-month nightmare: after refusing to consent to testosterone for her teenage daughter, Child Protective Services (CPS) intervened. They ultimately removed her child from the home. She is now hiding in Florida with her younger child, whom CPS is also trying to remove from her custody.
Ellie’s story is a human story. It is a messy, painful and emotional story that so many of you have either heard some version of before, or are currently experiencing some version of, in your own families.
It includes:
A bright, sensitive daughter who struggled with bullying, trauma, and mental-health challenges
Online communities that became her primary social world during COVID lockdowns
A psychiatrist who began discussing gender identity privately with the child
Requests for hormones that the parents asked to delay
And finally, a knock on the door, followed by the removal of their daughter
But Ellie’s story is also a dystopian tale of a sort of totalitarian control of families which most Westerners presume could never afflict their own countries.
Over the course of this conversation, I was struck by the pattern emerging between my story and the stories of Ellie and Jonni. It became clear to me that our stories and differences in life outcomes were largely due to a timeline of escalation:
In 2012, when I first articulated a trans identity at 12, my parents couldn’t even find a therapist who knew what to do with me. The system didn’t have answers, and they didn’t pretend to. So I was left alone with my thoughts, and given no support in dealing with intense confusion which just festered for the next 12 years.
By 2016, when Jonni was transitioned, pediatric gender clinics were not only fully operational, but parents were already being warned that their refusal to affirm and medicalize their kids could endanger their child’s life.
By the 2020s, Ellie’s case suggests something even more concerning: that institutions don’t just encourage affirmation, but that particularly corrupt jurisdictions may treat parental hesitation itself as a risk factor. And remove the child from their parents. In Ellie’s case, it’s not as if there was a divorce where one parent was advocating to retain custody of the child upon the basis that the other refused to give her testosterone. There was no apparent need for these social services to even be involved here.
The kids and teens who say they’re transgender are not the villains. They’re doing what kids do: searching for identity, trying to resolve distress, to understand themselves. They’re doing so by reaching for explanations that make sense of everything. The trans explanation is the one our culture has given them. They are not wrong for being products of their environment.
What’s harder to understand is the role of the adults.
Because when a teenager experiments with identity, that’s just development.
When professionals insist there is only one acceptable response which involves permanently, experimentally enshrining an adolescent’s distress and confusion into their bodies— and when they invoke institutional power to enforce it — that’s something else entirely.
Ellie says something in this conversation that stayed with me:
“Love is not always saying yes.”
I presume this sentiment is one which every parent understands instinctively. If a child reaches toward a hot stove, love means pulling them back. They may scream and throw a tantrum because they don’t understand why they’re being prevented from doing something which they really desire. However, the role of the parent is to protect the child from their own destructive impulses, regardless of how the child feels about the parents’ attempts to protect them.
The question this conversation raises for our society is equal parts unsettling and important:
What happens when saying “no” to your child isn’t treated as a parenting choice, but as grounds for governmental intervention?
In this interview, we don’t claim to have all the answers. We also don’t try to reduce a complex situation into slogans or talking points.
We are simply three people, from different points along this timeline of trans ideological capture, trying to understand how families end up caught between their children, medical institutions, and the state.
Because what I’ve learned, both from my own experience and from working with families, is that most of these situations don’t start with ideology. They start with developmental distress, confusion and unmet needs which become subsumed by an idea which falsely promises to make all the pain go away.
These stories start with:
A kid who feels different.
A kid who is chronically overwhelmed.
A kid who’s struggling socially, sensorily, emotionally, or developmentally — and who latches onto the one explanation our society gives them, that seems to make sense of everything. The explanation (trans) is flawed and it promises a (transition) panacea which routinely fails to deliver on its promises of making people’s lives easier or more bearable to live.
And when that happens, parents often feel like they’re standing at the edge of a cliff with no map.
Parents in these situations are given really bad advice. They’re usually told there are only two choices: affirm immediately, or risk losing their child — emotionally, psychologically, or even legally.
But in reality, there’s a much bigger middle ground.
A lot of the coaching work I do now involves helping parents slow the situation down, understand what their child is actually communicating beneath the confusing, ideological scripts, and figure out how to identify and address the real sources of distress or discontent within the family, within the child’s environment, and within the child’s own developmental needs.
I help families work through their complex situations with strategies which do not involve:
Endlessly fighting with their kids about gender.
Outsourcing everything to “experts” who neither know nor care about the life outcomes of these kids.
Instead, I focus on finding ways to help families keep vulnerable kids out of unnecessary interaction with corrupt, captured social institutions wherever possible—
by strengthening the parent-child relationship and helping parents find unique ways to build the skills that allow their family to navigate this together.
I’ve seen families make real headway when they approach this not as a culture war, but as a complex human experience that deserves patience, clarity, and grounded support.
If you’re a parent dealing with something similar, or feeling overwhelmed and unsure what to do next, I do offer parent coaching sessions where we make a plan for how work through these situations step by step. You don’t have to figure this out alone.
To book a parent coaching session with me, send me a DM or comment on this post:
And if Ellie’s story resonates with you, please share it. She needs coverage of her story so she can find people who can help her.
Support today’s guests by sharing the hell out of this post and by finding them at the links below:
Ellie:
Find her as Ukrainian Mom on Substack and on X
Jonni:
Find him as Jonni on Substack and on X. You can also donate to support his advocacy here
As always, please like, share and comment on this post. Let’s make Ellie’s story go viral.
