No white knight would be riding in to rescue their kids—they were it. California mom Erin Friday, 56, found out she was it for her then 11-year-old daughter. It started innocently enough: just a few boyish-sounding nicknames and a couple of extra letters from the alphabet. But innocent it was not.

A few girls, including Friday’s young one, were heard chattering in the front yard about some new things they learned at school. They were hip to fresh trends while, in their minds, boring old mom was the know-nothing dinosaur who was way behind the times.

“Five girls, each one of them picked a label that was on the alphabet, and they actually kind of giggled at me and said, ‘You’re cis, and you don’t understand,’” Friday told The Epoch Times. “I had never heard the term ‘cis’ before, and then they said, ‘Okay boomer.’”

It was 2019, and Friday’s daughter was in seventh grade. This was the mom’s first eye-opening moment: “What the heck are they teaching our kids at school?!” she wondered. Curiosity turned to concern as this gender-fixated culture germinated. “Oh, it’s probably just puberty,” she thought at first.

Friday’s once-girly daughter—a huge “My Little Pony” fan—started draping herself in baggy sweatshirts. Friday thought it just “an act of shyness” with the blooming of womanhood; Friday had experienced as much. But as the “My Little Pony” fan crossed into “soldier girl” territory, lacing up combat boots; as long-haired female friends started assuming guys’ names; as the purple and green hair dye broke out, mom’s worry worsened.

A Poison Seed in Middle School Sex Ed

So, this curious culture began bearing its strange and noxious fruit. It became cool to have a label. As one girl identified as pansexual, another called herself polyamorous (open to multiple partners), nonsensically. “Half her Girl Scout troupe came out as transgender,” Friday said. Out came the breast binders. Girly voices suspiciously dropped low overnight.

“My daughter picked ‘pansexual,’ she was 11. There’s nothing sexual about my 11-year-old daughter,” Friday said. “A couple picked ‘lesbian,’ but nobody picked ‘straight’—I guess in their terminology ‘cis’—because that’s boring; it’s like picking vanilla ice cream.” In a humorous caveat, Friday noted how they oddly kept tuning into “Twilight” to fawn over their hunky vampirical heart throbs—little girls that they were.

Yet momma bear was incensed, feeling betrayed by those at Central Middle School, in San Carlos, whom she trusted: her daughter’s teachers. Friday knew most of them by name, as she often volunteered there. They sometimes went for drinks together.

“Whatever your teacher says is gold and truthful,” Friday said. “The two most important people in a child’s life are the parents and then the teacher.” She had trusted them, and the school had let her down.

It wasn’t necessarily the teachers themselves who did the double-crossing. The mom learned how a third-party group came in and taught five hours of sex ed. With a name like Health-Connected, it sounds innocuous, though they are anything but. “They spent an entire hour of the five hours of instruction teaching about gender ideology, having the ‘genderbread man’ cartoon—where they point to the brain and they point to the body parts—and they essentially say that you can have a female brain and a male body, or vice versa.”

It was for fear of the students who came out as their “authentic self” that teachers kowtowed and treated them differently, Friday said. They were lauded as amazing and special, regarded as unicorns, and elevated to the status of superstar. “Kids who are sort of on the fringes, without a lot of big friend groups, or maybe a little weird, come out as trans and hit stardom,” she said. “If you’re white, middle class or affluent, and straight, you’re an oppressor, you’re boring, there’s nothing special about you.”

Over time, this unwholesome fruit ripened. In 2020 when COVID saw students locked down and learning from home, Friday was shocked to learn the public high school had been using her daughter’s male pronoun and confronted the administration. In a phone call, they told her the reason for this was to provide a “safe space,” which Friday found ludicrous. Her daughter was just down the hall from her.

“They responded back very, very strangely [about the matter of changing her name], ‘Oh, well, we didn’t do it legally,’” Friday said. “I told them, ‘You can’t actually, I’m the parent. Remember that. I am the parent. You are not the parent.’

“I guess I must be ‘unsafe’ because I use her female name, and her female pronouns. And then Child Protective Services [CPS] showed up at my door. The police came later.”

CPS deemed her daughter a suicide risk, citing a search she did on her school iPad. Though CPS ended up dropping its investigation, Friday was infuriated by the school’s using a suicide fear as a guise for a possible abuse claim for her confronting their brazen secret social transition of her daughter.

Dealing with all this madness—her daughter’s puberty, the girls’ labels, the school’s betrayal, and now CPS on her doorstep—Friday’s instinct saw to the heart of it. Lockdown-induced depression had more to do with her daughter’s gender outburst than anything else. She wasn’t the only child sent spiraling into a mental tailspin by COVID. It was clear as day.

As for the solution, for Friday and countless other parents, this was uncharted waters.

Her hiring a therapist for her daughter fell flat before it began. The therapist insisted Friday’s memory of her daughter’s girliness was “incorrect.” “I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. So she was into ‘My Little Pony’ when she was 3 just because she was waiting to come out of her shell and let us know that she was a boy?’” Friday said. “I have a son; they’re very different.”

The therapist flaunted the “41 percent chance of committing suicide” trope before Friday. “When I queried her about the study, it was very clear to me that she didn’t read it. I had,” Friday said. “I would have been fired from my job as a lawyer if I ever cited a case that I didn’t read.” So that’s what the therapist who failed to treat her daughter’s depression got. Fired.

To Friday, it seemed the whole world had gone mad.

The Battle to Reclaim a Lost Daughter

It was time for momma bear to wake from her slumber and start some serious gender deprogramming with her daughter. The first step would involve finding a gender-critical therapist more interested in learning why her daughter wasn’t getting out of bed, brushing her teeth, or eating, than peddling ideology.

Meanwhile, Friday would have to arm herself with knowledge. She dove deep. While reading books, such as “Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult” by Maria Keffler, she listened to Benjamin Boyce’s podcast highlighting detransitioners and “Gender: A Wider Lens.”

Like peeling back layers of some rancid, decaying onion, she uncovered the ever-darker and more sinister nature of the trans agenda. There were online groups specifically targeting trans-identified kids which fed them poisonous indoctrination. Their parents were framed as villains for not affirming their identity.

It got worse. These groups bombarded them with filthy pornography that came in waves, which Friday described as “beyond the pale.” Monitoring her daughter’s browsing history, devices, and social media, she kept a bucket beside her in case she couldn’t stomach it.

With her own offspring pitted against her, they were as if on opposite sides of a chasm. For Friday to reclaim the mind of her lost little one she would have to bridge the gap.

She knew what wouldn’t work: long discussions; science-based evidence; being silent in hopes that it would just pass. It would not pass, she knew. You have to address it head-on.

While her daughter would have to figure it out herself, momma bear would drop useful bread crumbs along the way—questions and hints that would leave “little cracks” in her mind, until enough light of truth shone through and reality dawned.

“I asked her questions about the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, and I said ‘Oh gosh, this isn’t good for females. Are you allowed to take it?’” Friday said. “She totally yelled at me, she said, ‘I’m not a female!’ and stomped off. But that’s a win. I mean, that’s a biological reality.”

Another line of attack unfolded thusly:

“I asked her why she thought she was a boy, and she responded she didn’t like her breasts,” Friday said. “And I followed up, ‘What else?’ ‘I don’t like my period.’ ‘So, now you just established why you don’t like being a girl. But why do you think you’re a boy?’ And she can’t answer it and she gets, of course, angry but it leaves a crack in her mind.”

Friday left nothing in the ring battling the invisible enemy of lies. She quit her job and spent 16-hour days tracing the agenda to its diabolical roots. She now identifies transgenderism as “a cult.”

In order to break the cult’s grip on her daughter’s mind, Friday tried a strategy of playing kooky cult podcasts in the car. The Moonies cult—with their drug-fueled arranged mass marriages—conveyed the extent to which people can be duped at the behest of another.

Friday hinted to her daughter, “Some people think that transgenderism is a cult,” and walked off to let that stew.

Getting on her daughter’s case was Friday’s duty. She confiscated devices galore, searched her room, and found piles of iPhones under mattresses. Mom learned just how clever her daughter was: she had two of every social media account. There was the Instagram mom looks at, and the shadow account for her trans “friends.”

Friday went as far as calling her daughter by different names—including male names—for she wasn’t ready to accept her female one.

It took about a year and a half. But her finally accepting her given name was the sign they were almost home. Facing her mom’s unrelenting bombardment, the transgender house of cards folded in a heap. Friday was right: as her daughter’s depression melted away, so did the anxiety-induced persona.

“The depression started to melt away, and that’s very important in that the transgender identity is a maladaptive response to depression, to anxiety,” Friday said. “Once you address the underlying issue, the transgenderism starts to fade away.”

But the moment Friday knew it was real came before a planned Christmas family vacation when her daughter picked a bathing suit.

“I had put out a bunch of different bathing suit options for her, including boy shorts and tank top kind of things,” Friday said. “And she chose the bikini that she—oh my God, I’m gonna cry—that she used to steal from me when she was a little girl.”

The Transgender War Rages On

For Friday, the battle was won. But the war is still raging for the countless other parents with children still vulnerable. And so, momma bear marched on—and plunged deeper down the rabbit hole. She would learn who or what is behind the mutilation and sterilization of children.

Conscious of the tinfoil hat label that so effectively silences inquiry, she nevertheless speaks candidly: Transgenderism is not only a cult but a cash fountain for Big Pharma that reaps lifelong patients in the form of gender-transitioning children.

“This is a $11 billion industry,” Friday said. “It’s a multi-headed hydra. There are people who are pushing this for financial gain; the medical community and the Big Pharma are pushing this because each trans-identified child is worth a million to a million-and-a-half dollars. They are lifelong medical patients.”

The promulgating of transgenderism in society at large is also a deliberate culling of the herd, the mom adds.

“This is eugenics,” she said. “We’re telling a little boy who likes to play with girls’ things—again, a regressive stereotype—that he must be actually a girl. And so, he would probably grow up to just be a gay kid, but now we’re transitioning him to be a girl—which sterilizes him—which again culls the herd.”

In a word, it’s Marxism.

The depravity runs still deeper. Friday divulges that all this furthers the normalization of pedophilia—a fetish that festers in the underbelly of society: in fashion, entertainment, politics, and other cesspools.

Ultimately the goal is “the destruction of the family” and “the destruction of our democracy,” Friday said, adding that it “could actually be the downfall of our society as a whole if this continues.”

The former attorney chose not to return to her job but stay on the front lines to fight. She joined Our Duty, a parent-run international group without hierarchy that allows parent members free reign to act in their milieu to fight transgenderism. They write laws, testify before government bodies, and offer desperate parents somewhere to turn in a world gone mad.

“I spent a good, probably a year crying,” Friday said, speaking of her motive. “I had severe depression, I thought of killing myself because I couldn’t watch my daughter die by a thousand cuts and have the world cheer her on and bear witness to this.”

She turned her sorrow into action through her voice. While some parents hide behind aliases, Friday chose a different tactic.

“I’m going to be an advocate and gonna let my child know exactly what I’m doing,” she said. “I speak out now with my real name because we need to. And it’s not dangerous—they can’t cancel us all.”

Today, Friday is cautiously optimistic for her daughter. Now 16, her future is far from certain. With college on the horizon, there will be gender warriors pressuring, while the internet remains rife with predators lurking. There are no “safe places,” Friday said.

Yet she ventures a prediction.

“Now, I don’t really believe that she will be maligned because she’s really quite enjoying her feminine body,” Friday said. “But she got captured once. I’m not gonna sleep soundly until she’s 25 and that frontal lobe has formed.”

Share your stories with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.com, and continue to get your daily dose of inspiration by signing up for the Inspired newsletter at TheEpochTimes.com/newsletter