In middle school, Abel Garcia wondered if he was a woman. Now he wishes he had been protected from choosing a destructive path that has permanently affected his life.
“My culture is [about] being very masculine,” Mr. Garcia, now 26, told The Epoch Times. “I always questioned myself as a young man, to the point that I wasn’t sure if I could reach the standards of what it meant to be a man.”
Now, a new organization—the Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC)—hopes to protect young people like Mr. Garcia from the radical gender ideology movement.
Part of the way the group hopes to do that is by helping Mr. Garcia and other detransitioners share their stories with lawmakers. The group also hopes to break the child sex-change industry by suing it into unprofitability.
At 19, Mr. Garcia started taking cross-sex hormones. By 23, he had continued pursuing gender transition and had gotten breast implants.
Soon after, he realized he had made a mistake, Mr. Garcia said.
“Had I continued getting every surgery ... if the world recognized me as a woman—if I acted like a woman—all I would have been is a caricature of what I believed a woman was, cosplaying as a woman,” he said.
The final straw was when the transgender community shunned him because he wanted to become a police officer, he said. Suddenly experiencing a pullback of their excessive affirmation—known as “love-bombing”—he finally could think clearly, he said.
He began to reject the ideology, he said.
Today, Mr. Garcia still struggles to repair his body from the wounds of surgery and wrong signals of hormones, he said. Although he transitioned as an adult, he profoundly regrets his choices.
Mr. Garcia said he is shocked that children can get sex-change surgery.
“We’re gonna have an entire generation of confused young adults who are, unfortunately, sterilized,” he said.
Fighting for Children
In 2019, Georgia attorney Vernadette Broyles closed her law practice and founded the CPRC to try to bring child transgender procedures to a halt.The organization hopes to fight the child sex change industry with legal battles and advocacy, according to its chief operating officer Joel Thornton.
“We represent parents and the children who have had their rights trampled on by the school systems, by governmental entities, or hospitals that are not engaging parents in the discussion on what to do with their minor children,” he told The Epoch Times.
Today, protecting children is an “uphill battle,” because transgender ideology has swiftly infested “virtually the entire culture,” Mr. Thornton said.
“You’ve got the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], you’ve got GLSEN [Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network], you’ve got other of the activist organizations that are that are challenging these lawsuits everywhere,” he said.
Transgender activists have done a “masterful” job of persuading Americans and people in power to accept child sex change, Mr. Thornton said.
Now, governments, corporations, and the entertainment industry now enthusiastically support child sex change.
This situation inflicts intolerable pain, loss, and suffering on children, he said.
The CPRC has been involved with several cases in which child protective services workers tried to remove a child from the home because parents opposed the child’s desire to gender transition, Mr. Thornton said. The group also has sued school districts for helping transition kids without parental knowledge.
Now, the campaign is looking for a victory in federal court to protect children.
“We’re about to file a federal lawsuit in Virginia on these very issues, protecting parental rights based on the constitutional principles and the values that the Supreme Court has upheld for parental rights,” Mr Thornton said.
Constitutional principles will likely support parents, he said.
Catching Up With the Science
The CPRC also connects detransitioners to lawmakers, he said. Detransitioner is the term for children and adults who try to reverse the procedures they had when trying to live as the opposite sex.“We help present a lot of those folks to legislators, to give them someone who can come in and give them factual testimony as to how they were handled, how the medical community handled them, what the setbacks were, and what the drawbacks were,” he said.
Outside America, the tide is turning against child sex change, Mr. Thornton said.
Several European countries have tightened their laws against child sex change as new research reveals the harms of the practice.
“And yet, we’re rushing headlong into it,” he said of the United States. “We know everybody else is saying, ‘Hold on, let’s put our brakes on with minors.’”
But the nature of the federal system makes it easy for interested children to travel to other states for child sex change procedures.
California had minimum safeguards to protect Mr. Garcia—then, a resident who wanted to live as a woman—from making decisions he would regret, he said. As he was preparing to “transition,” no medical professional he consulted encouraged him to slow down or reconsider, he said.
But when he wanted to detransition, California bureaucracy and law made it hard to do so, he said.
Getting help to go back to looking male was considered part of “conversion therapy.” Under California law, conversion therapy is any attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s illegal in that state.
“Everything we had to do was of my own choice,” Mr. Garcia said.
He had to fight the state and his insurance company to get his fake breasts removed and chest reconstructed to look masculine again, he said. He called the policies “insane.”
No matter what laws are passed regarding transgenderism in other parts of the country, California and some other liberal states welcome vulnerable children who want to transition, Mr. Thornton noted.
Sex-Change States
The CPRC faces a difficult problem. Child sex-change surgery is an interstate issue.A sex-change surgery across state lines is legal, he said. But cross-sex hormones, which must be administered consistently, are legally complicated.
Some states ban child sex change procedures, including cross-sex hormone use. But the laws that do so punish doctors, not children who self-administer hormones.
If a doctor in another state gives a child hormones to self-administer at home, it complicates the situation, Mr. Thornton said.
“It would depend on how the law’s written,” Mr. Thornton said.
“If we can stop it happening in Georgia, stop it happening in Tennessee, stop it happening in Texas, and other states around the country, we can at least limit the damage that is done to these children.”
Ultimately, the only way to break the child sex-change industry likely is to continue filing lawsuits that make child sex-change operations unprofitable, Mr. Thornton said.
As increasing numbers of detransitioners consider suing the doctors who mutilated them, pro-reality law firms have taken notice.
“You’re gonna have to solve the economic issue,” Mr. Thornton said. “As long as there’s a lot of money involved, there’s a lot of people that don’t care who’s harmed along the way to make their money.”
“We’re all woefully underfunded for this fight compared to the billions that are out there,” said Mr. Thornton. “But we’re all working together.”
