When I met Erin Lee and her husband in September 2022 at an event sponsored by the Independence Institute (which publishes a column of mine through Complete Colorado), the Lees generally were accepting of LGBTQ people. They believed that, in their specific case, an overzealous LGBTQ activist at school had convinced their daughter that she was transgender, when really she was just a confused and disaffected young girl. They didn’t think their case illustrated a general problem with LGBTQ people or with the LGBTQ movement.
Their own child was not transgender, they thought, but maybe some other children were.
Fast forward two years, and we find that Lee has transitioned into an anti-transgender ideologue who suggests that any trans orientation goes against God. As Lee’s child was, according to Lee, for a time under the thrall of “LGBTQ ideology,” so Lee herself is now under the thrall of an anti-LGBTQ ideology, although apparently the irony is lost on Lee.
We needn’t rely on my shaky memory of Lee’s earlier position. Lee sat down with Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute for a show released May 8, 2022. Caldara says, “If you want your kid to be involved in a gender and sexuality awareness club, more power to you.” Lee says, “Right.” Caldara continues:
I’ve got gay family members, and when they had to come out years ago, there was no support group for them. There was no place for them to go. I think it’s spectacular that these schools have clubs and support groups. I think it’s a terrific thing.
Lee breaks in:
I agree, and that’s been our position all along. My husband and I are not against LGBTQ programming. We’re just not okay with how this particular program [involving Lee’s child] happened and that the school systems are intentionally doing it in secret.
Caldara summarizes a potential caricature of Lee as an “uptight, anti-gay, anti-trans, Bible-thumping, ‘we gotta get the Devil out of our public schools'” type. Lee replies:
Wouldn’t it be easier if I was? That’s the argument that I’ve been met with all along this road of speaking out, that this was an isolated incident, that I’m just intolerant, I’m bigoted. But, again, I’m not against LGBTQ programming. I’m an unaffiliated voter that voted for [Democrat Jared] Polis [for governor]. And I know that’s an unpopular opinion on this show, but I’m clearly not a right-wing, intolerant nutbag who just wants this kind of thing out of our school.
Lee also says that she would be fully accepting of a transgender child, only her child is not transgender:
I know my daughter. I’ve known her since the day she was born. She is my girly little girl, always has been. [She] came upon confusing hormones [in puberty] in a really tough time, having moved to a new school during COVID. … I think it was a situational circumstance. No, she’s not transgender. And if she was, I would love her just the same. If she was that point-oh-one percent of the population, then we would absolutely appreciate that that’s who she is. But we know our daughter. And this stranger who didn’t even know her name did not know our daughter.
Lee’s 2022 position strikes me as eminently reasonable. Although I was not present at the events in question and have never met Lee’s child, if we go by Lee’s description of events — which I have no reason to doubt — the activist in question was out of line. For readers not familiar with the story, here is Lee’s account as told to Caldara:
We’re new to town [in 2021], we’re new to school. … It’s the height of COVID protocols. Our daughter hasn’t made a single connection with a student her age. She’s shy, artistic, introverted. Her art teacher one day invites her to stay for art club after school. Seems harmless, of course we agreed to it. … She did text me during the day when the invite came through from the teacher, and, longing [for her] to make connection, of course we want her to attend art club. … So she gets to ‘art club,’ and it’s actually gender and sexuality awareness ‘art’ club, or GSA. The teacher has invited in an outside presenter. … She, for example, told my daughter if she’s not one-hundred-percent comfortable in her female body [at age 12] that she’s transgender.
I doubt you could find a single woman in the world who would say she was “one hundred percent comfortable in her female body” at the onset of puberty. The same for men. To me, this seems like an activist picking out an isolated and lonely child for indoctrination. I could be wrong, though, and we’re not getting the activist’s side of the story. Regardless, I think most parents would sympathize with Lee’s concerns at the time.
Now jump to the present. Lee appeared with Richard Harris for his Truth and Liberty show on June 26, 2024. Harris is associated with Charis Bible College in Woodland Park, an institution that readers of the Colorado Times Recorder will know from Logan Davis’s multi-part report. Harris also has written in to CTR to respond to an earlier article by Davis. With Harris, Lee shared a substantially different message.
Here is how Harris summarizes Lee’s story:
Erin is a full-time mom from northern Colorado. … At one time her daughter was enrolled in the public school system there. … and she was actually secretly recruited into a lesbian, gay, transgender meeting. They pretended that it was actually art club. And in this meeting her daughter was basically, I’m just going to go ahead and say it, indoctrinated into LGBT ideology. [She] came out of the meeting thinking that she was trans and queer, and it set her and her family on a downward spiral. I think it was an eighteen month hellish journey that, praise be to God, eventually resulted in her daughter telling her mom and dad that she didn’t want to be trans, she wanted to be a girl, and they were able, with the support of family and church, and the Holy Spirit, to navigate their way out of it.
Harris further praises Lee as a “great advocate for common sense and Biblical values.”
If Lee had wanted to maintain her position as trans-inclusionary, but critical of the particular events involving her daughter, she would not have appeared on a show widely known for its hard-line anti-LGBTQ stance. Lee’s newer stance is compatible with what she now says on her Stop Gender Ideology website, that she wants to “shift our culture away from dangerous gender ideology being perpetuated by adults onto our kids.”
After Lee retells her story and casts children’s claims to be transgender as “gender confusion,” Harris says, “Praise the Lord, your daughter actually came out of this deception.”
Lee then speaks about her religious conversion:
It was about nine months after the incident [at school] had happened, that we sat her down and had really hard conversation. Dad in particular was just really blunt. And it’s like she was waiting for us to be an off-ramp. She was waiting for that moment for us to say, is this really what you want to do, and she said, “No, it’s not. I don’t want to live this [transgender] label anymore. And that really coincided with us getting in with a good church. And we weren’t strong believers before this happened, and it was very much our faith that led us to having that hard truth in love conversation about what she was going through.
Harris asks Lee, “How important was it for you as a family to have followers of Jesus around you to help you in this time?” Lee replies, “It was everything. I think we would still be in that dark cloud of confusion and turmoil if we had not found the Lord.”
Lee discusses the sort of advice she now gives to parents of children who claim to be transgender:
When parents are struggling, I usually say, okay, you’ve tried X, Y, Z, but have you tried going to church? Have you tried speaking to your child about their true identity in Christ? Because I don’t believe any child can truly come out of the darkness without finding their identity in Christ. They’ll continue to search the world, whether it’s trans, or using drugs, or whatever it is. That was essential to our family’s [recovery].
As Lee nods in enthusiastic agreement, Harris rejects all gender-affirming medical care, saying, “It’s gender-rejecting care, is really what it is. Right? You’re rejecting your God-given gender, to pretend that you’re a different gender.” That’s about as trans-exclusionary a statement as you can find. (Incidentally, there is nothing definitive in the Bible against being transgender, not that it should matter if there were.)
Lee, then, has made a pretty hard turn from saying she’d love a transgender child “just the same” to likening being transgender to having a heroin addiction, speaking enthusiastically with trans-exclusionary pundits, and linking from her website to such blatantly anti-LGBTQ organizations as Focus on the Family.
So, to recount, a lonely and isolated person, feeling alienated from the society around her, and just wishing someone would listen, found solace in a new group of people who promised her a new identity, a new way of thinking, and a new purpose. If Lee thinks about it, she might find her own story eerily familiar.
