When Media Promote the Cult’s Narrative

Correcting the Record About Beth Bourne and Her Gender-Confused Child

Beth Bourne seems so fragile when she speaks of her daughter. I almost expect her at any moment to crumple. It’s obvious that she’s holding in tremendous pain. Her 18-year old first-born Elisa has cut off all contact with her. It’s now more than a year since they’ve spoken.

But the trans cult tells kids that if a parent isn’t completely onboard with every aspect of the ideology, the parent-child relationship must be severed. The parent is a bigot. The parent is a transphobe. The parent isn’t “safe.”

For years, Beth compromised on almost everything, using the pronouns and name Elisa adopted, taking her shopping in the boys’ department, even letting her wear a binder (a bra substitute that flattens the breasts). She would not relent on her child’s most hazardous requests though: puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Since seeing the relationship with her daughter dissolve, she’s made it her mission to alert other parents to dangers she herself knew almost nothing about until it was too late.

Only vaguely familiar with Beth before I read an article about her in the Sacramento Bee, I still recognized it as a hit job. It painted this loving mother as an extremist.

Surprisingly, Beth wasn’t angry about the piece. She was grateful, she said, that the reporter spoke to her as well as to her daughter. The story suggested that Beth was responsible for tearing her family apart, but she hopes people will read between the lines and recognize the truth.

Meanwhile, knowing what I do now of Beth’s story, and how it was finessed to fit the pro-trans narrative, I’m angry enough for both of us.

The SacBee story insinuated, with passages like the following, that a mother’s attempts to protect kids was tantamount to mental instability:

“Beth’s politics became more extreme.”

“But this crusade has taken an increasingly fanatical turn.”

“Beth…increasingly radicalized.”

I wanted to set the record straight and decided the best way to show that Beth Bourne is neither extreme, nor fanatical, nor radical, is to tell her story as she told it to me. It’s one the SacBee reporter could easily have learned, but either didn’t, or didn’t bother reporting.

Like so many other parents of gender-confused kids I’ve interviewed, Beth was a lifelong Democrat. If she knew that the school her kids attended was committed to “social justice,” it wouldn’t have concerned her. Beth Bourne was unaware of the dark side of what passes for social justice today.

She was surprised when her daughter arrived home from class one day claiming a new sexual identity. Eleven-year old Elisa declared that she was bisexual. It’s impossible to know how many prepubescent kids come home from a “sex ed” class having adopted one of the new sexual identity labels—bisexual, pansexual, polyamorous, agender and others. But as has been true for countless other kids, it was Elisa’s first stop on the trans train.  

Elisa was also coping with her first exposure to sexual trauma. Her best friend in sixth grade had witnessed a sexual assault on another child. She didn’t report it, but told Elisa. The incident affected the girls deeply. They were also watching the Netflix series “Thirteen Reasons Why” about a teen who committed suicide. Both girls started to think and talk about killing themselves.

”My daughter just became really withdrawn that whole summer and was on her phone a lot,” recalls Beth.

According to several therapists, when a kid is exposed to sexual trauma—even when it happens to someone else and not herself—it can make a girl want to escape womanhood.

As Elisa started seventh grade, her mental health deteriorated. She began cutting herself.

Beth knew something was terribly wrong. She sensed that it might be tied to the sexual assault. The worried mom didn’t know it at the time, but the school had been promoting transgender ideology to students. Those lessons coming when they did might have made a weird sort of sense to a twelve-year old girl: elude your angst by becoming someone else. She began dressing like a boy. She chopped away her long pretty dark blonde hair and wore what was left in a boy’s style.

 “Her father and stepmother immediately took her to the Sacramento Lavender Library, it's an LGBTQ library, and they took her to Pride Festivals, and they let her check out the book. I Am  Jazz about Jazz Jennings.”

Nowhere near as willing to embrace Elisa’s out-of-nowhere decision to present as a boy, but desperate for her daughter to be well and safe, Beth would eventually agree to a name change, new pronouns, boy’s haircut, boy’s clothing, binder—everything. But she was still uneasy with how far her ex seemed willing to go.

Both parents decided to enroll Elisa in an intensive dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) group where the girl would learn skills that they hoped would help her manage her stress and keep her from further injuring herself. Elisa also began taking an antidepressant to treat what her psychiatrist diagnosed as an anxiety disorder.

But in eighth grade, Elisa’s emotional state worsened. Formerly an A student, she began getting Ds and even Fs in all her classes except PE, choir, and Spanish. And she was still cutting herself. One day in school, she sliced into her thigh so deeply, it required stitches.

Sometime in November 2018, in the midst of all this, Elisa wrote letters: one to her father, and another to her mom. She began the one to Beth by saying, “As you undoubtedly know, I am trans. My name is Ian, pronouns he/him.” She also wrote that “nothing medical is necessary for many years.”  

Soon after, the school changed the eighth grader’s name to “Ian” on all her records.

Contrary to what the SacBee article suggested, Elisa’s life didn’t magically change for the better because she imagined herself a boy.

In fact, two months after officially “coming out”—and more than a year after starting to present as the opposite sex—she carved an unsettling message into her arm with a razor.  

You wouldn’t know about any of Elisa’s mental health issues from the SacBee article, though Beth has voluminous school, medical, and court documentation that she shared with me, with other reporters, and would have shared with any other writer who was interested. Instead, from what the SacBee reporter wrote about this period, a reader would assume that it was Beth, not Elisa, who was experiencing a mental breakdown:

“As [Elisa] embraced their trans identity, they grew happier. Their father and stepmother affirmed the transition. Beth remained concerned about it, and increasingly radicalized. In so doing, she isolated herself not just from her child, but her community.”

Elisa’s mental health did, at last, show noticeable improvement once she began ninth grade. Whether due to the coping mechanisms she learned in therapy or the antidepressants or both, as the youngster’s emotional turmoil abated, the cutting stopped, and her grades improved dramatically.

But Elisa’s assurance, at age thirteen, that “nothing medical is necessary for many years” was no longer operative by the time she turned fourteen.

Her parents took Elisa to see her doctor at Kaiser Permanente, a managed care company, because the girl was having dizzy spells. While there, the doctor overheard Elisa’s father call her by male pronouns and offered to change her medical records to reflect that. “And then the pediatrician said, ‘You should go to Kaiser's Gender Proud clinic in Oakland,’” recalls Beth. “’It's a one-stop shop where you can meet with an endocrinologist.’”

At this “one-stop shop,” which Beth says she is certain are the words the doctor used, the endocrinologist could prescribe the pretty young teen, first, puberty blockers and then, cross-sex hormones.

The doctor assured the parents the drugs could be safely administered. Elisa’s father was open to the idea. Like so many other parents, he apparently believed he could trust a pediatrician’s word.

Beth wanted to see the evidence to back that up. She had been researching since Elisa declared herself a boy. In late 2019, there was still very little resistance to the dominant narrative that these powerful chemicals (that we now know cause permanent bodily changes, and increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, liver damage, and an overall shortened lifespan), were just fine to give to children.

“My daughter's psychiatrist…texted me the article that Jesse Singal wrote from the Atlantic,” says Beth. “These parents were pushing back on [kids claiming to be trans] and they were finding that their daughters were, you know, were growing out of the identity.”

She decided to call the Kaiser endocrinologist to ask about the drugs. “He said, you know, it's an emerging science, but  we know that you can successfully put kids on these puberty blockers to ‘buy some time,’ and then use testosterone or estrogen to help kids, you know, whatever, affirm their gender identity.”

He painted the drugs as benign but the term that stuck in Beth’s mind was “emerging science.”

So, there were no long-term studies?

None.

No one knew what might happen to these children in ten, twenty, thirty years?

Correct. No one knew.

That meant, her daughter would be among the guinea pigs.

She had acquiesced on everything else, to date. But she could not acquiesce to that.

As she drove her daughter across town one day, she explained her decision. “I said, ‘I would let you have your breasts amputated before I would let them put you on testosterone or puberty blockers. Because I know if you take your breasts off, you've lost your breasts, you've lost your ability to breastfeed. But if I put you on testosterone, I don't know how that's going to affect your brain development, your bone density, your fertility, because it's never been studied.’”

She offered Elisa a compromise. She would let her go on a type of birth control that would stop her period almost completely.

Meanwhile, she had to explain what was going on to her son, who was almost three years younger than Elisa.  

At the end of her junior year in high school, Elisa asked Beth to come with her to speak to her therapist. Beth recalls the visit. “She said, ‘Mom, this is going to be hard for you to hear, but [the therapist] knows. I'm going to be living with Dad all summer.’”

Beth had done enough research by now to expect something like this. Dad was fully affirming and she still was resisting. She’d fought when Elisa decided at the tender age of fourteen to legally change her name to Ian. Elisa’s birth certificate, passport, all her papers now say that she was born male. Beth had refused to allow the teen to go on the powerful chemical body modifiers that her ex was willing to endorse. As her daughter got closer to her eighteenth birthday, the age when she would be free to get a prescription for cross-sex hormones without parental consent, Beth worked harder to persuade her that she was and always would be female, no matter what her birth certificate now said.

“But now I realize you almost can't do that, right? If you're in a cult…Your parents say there's no such thing, they're not going to believe you, right? And then, you know, the cult says you need to go ‘no contact’ with that parent.”

Beth says that Elisa, her father, and her stepmother were united in the belief that Beth was a transphobe.

 “I did get her to go on a trip the end of that summer,” says Beth. “We went to Bangkok, and we went to Tokyo together. And it was really fun.”

They got back just in time for Elisa’s seventeenth birthday. It was a typical celebration with the family around Beth’s dining room table. There were cake, balloons, and presents. Beth gave Elisa a special watch she’d bought while they were in Japan. For that moment, they were all happy together.

“And then she walked out of the room on her seventeenth birthday and she never came back.”

Beth managed to see Elisa from afar at school choir and theater events, and at her son’s volleyball games. Elisa was still going by “Ian,” but Beth noticed a few changes as she began her senior year. First, she was wearing nail polish. Then, her daughter began dressing in more feminine styles, even on occasion, wearing skirts. She used mascara. And she was dating a boy.

Beth held out hope that Elisa might be in the early stages of desisting.

The mom had already begun a deeper dive into the ideology that had ruptured her family. She was involved in online groups such as PITT for the parents of gender-confused kids. Through other moms, dads, and relatives, she’d discovered how similar many of their experiences were.

Armed with more and better information than she’d had when Elisa first expressed gender confusion, Beth arranged to attend her son’s sex education class. She  requested and was permitted to screenshot the materials (though when she later asked for the same materials via a public records request, the school refused).

The sex ed slides featured photos of Caitlyn Jenner and of women who identified as male. The women had had mastectomies and their photos exhibited the scars. One of the women was pregnant and had a full beard. They were identified to the children in the class as “transmen.”

“They tell kids there are thirteen different genders.”

There was simply no basis for such a claim. This wasn’t “sex education.” Beth was appalled.

She shared her screenshotted records with the anti-woke group, Libs of TikTok. “They got like a million views.”

It was the beginning of her activism on behalf of unsuspecting parents whose children, like her own, were being taught ideology in place of fact.

But in Davis, says Beth, “Everyone's like, it's wonderful that kids are learning there are thirteen genders.”

Since then, she’s become a regular at school board meetings, pushing back against the extreme indoctrination in the district. She’s also hosted a number of events outside the school that expose the falsehoods being treated as fact. Though she does her best to alert parents, the whole city seems ideologically captured. It’s almost impossible to break through. But there’s no question that she’s a mom on a mission, just as other mothers and fathers of gender-confused kids  (some now desisted, others still seduced by the cult) make it their mission to sound the alarm, hoping they can save other families from what theirs went through.

And in July 2023, this lifelong Democrat took over the chair position of Moms for Liberty, Yolo County chapter, a parents rights group, founded by conservatives, which has attracted parents from across the political spectrum whose children have been negatively affected by woke ideology.

Elisa, meanwhile, apparently switched from identifying as a boy to a non-binary identity sometime in her senior year of high school. She can be seen providing public comments on video at a school board meeting, where she complained that “My mother is a part of this group who is protesting against my rights.”

She got riotous applause from the crowd behind her, many of whom held up signs in the pastel rainbow colors associated with trans ideology sporting such slogans as “No Hate In Our Town”; “No More Hate In Davis”; and “Davis Says NO To Transphobia.” Elisa was the last of about a dozen speakers, all of whom spoke in favor of the school board’s trans policies, and all of whom were encouraged by cheers and applause from the sign wavers and others behind them. Two of the speakers repeated the extravagantly false claim that “trans” children who aren’t affirmed have a fifty percent chance of attempting suicide. Though the research is thin on the topic, it tells us that gender-confused children, like other kids with mental distress, are indeed at somewhat greater risk than those without mental health issues.

Being affirmed in the delusion of being a different sex, however, has no effect on that risk.

But this was a meeting of, by, and for believers, so facts that don’t fit the narrative wouldn’t be welcome. In such an environment, it would seem futile to say something as simple, obvious, and sane as “no child is born in the wrong body.”

Yet that’s what Beth Bourne repeats every time she gets the chance.

There is one more quote from the SacBee article that needs to be addressed here, because the average reader would take it at face value:

“Last spring, [Beth Bourne] was served a restraining order from the Davis Joint Unified School District for sharing school teachers’ personal information. (The restraining order was ultimately revoked.)

If the reporter had done the most minimal investigation, she would have discovered that Beth Bourne never shared “school teachers’ personal information.” She merely named teachers and others who engaged in promoting trans ideology to children. Just names.

Teacher’s names are public information. Their behavior in public schools can’t be barred from public scrutiny. Beth Bourne was essentially doing citizen journalism, filling the gap left by media that ignored or perhaps even supported indoctrination of students by teachers.

But the school district wanted to shut down her criticism of their policies. Anonymous bomb threats that had nothing to do with Beth had been called in to area schools, and school district officials attempted to link Beth’s advocacy to those threats. It’s just as likely that someone who was in favor of promoting the ideology as someone who was against it had called in the threats. But filing for and then dropping the restraining order was an effective way to paint a concerned parent as a radical without having to provide a molecule of evidence.

And there’s one more issue to note about Elisa. By the end of high school, she’d changed her name to “Jude.” And at some point during this, her freshman year at college, she changed her name again, now using a female name, “Lily,” although she still claims to be non-binary and part of the queer community.

The SacBee reporter, ever so briefly mentioned that Elisa had changed names multiple times, and switched identities from opposite sex to non-binary, but never bothered to question whether that might be significant. The story suggested that Elisa (AKA ”Ian”/”Jude”/"Lily") was certain of who she was (and therefore, it was wrong of Beth to question).

 How certain could Elisa have been if, by eighteen, she’d gone through a couple of different identities, and several names? 

To my eye, this says that Elisa’s demands to be accepted for who she says she is, are in fact (quite obviously), coming from a young woman who hasn't yet figured out who that is. 

With luck, she will one day find herself—and find her way back to the mother who loves her.