“Empathy, kindness, understanding: Yeah, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what’s really going on? Lies, deception, and physical child abuse.”
Chris Elston was living a normal life as the father of two girls in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, when he became aware of what he calls the “greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history.”
“And the only thing I could do was to have some signs made and go outside,” he says.
Over the last few years, Billboard Chris, as he’s commonly known, has had conversations about gender ideology with tens of thousands of people on the streets of cities across North America. He’s also been assaulted by gender activists close to 40 times—including one case in which his arm was broken.
“The actual cure, historically, for gender dysphoria, is puberty itself,” says Mr. Elston. “These puberty blockers, combined with the cross sex hormones, are sterilizing children. They’re sterilizing thousands of autistic kids. And we’re supposed to be the bigots who are speaking out against this? It’s total madness.”
Watch the clip:
We discuss the taboos and developments around gender and what Mr. Elston has gleaned about this topic from his conversations with ordinary people on the street.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (46 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0127ChrisElston
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Chris Elston, or Billboard Chris, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Chris Elston: The pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Your billboard says, “Children are never born in the wrong body.” It’s such a simple idea and such a conversation starter. Please tell us about that.
Mr. Elston: I also have, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers,” which I wear most of the time as well. Our kids are being taught that they might have been born in the wrong body. I’ve recently altered my message a little bit. I’ve dropped the wrong body part, because sometimes when you say that children are never born in the wrong body, people get confused a little bit. They need to think about it too much, so I’ve shortened it to just, “Children are never born wrong”, because people can understand that right away.
What are we doing teaching children that they need to be something they are not? Because at the very core of gender ideology, that is exactly what is being taught to our kids. This is almost like a quasi-religious movement, where they are led to believe they have a gendered soul, that somewhere on the inside they have this gender identity that doesn’t match their biological sex. It is complete nonsense. The whole theory of gender identity is nonsense. Gender identity is just a personality.
I have this expression, “There are two sexes, zero genders, and infinite personalities,” because that sums up everyone. We would all be better off as a society if we just got rid of this word gender altogether.
Mr. Jekielek: Where did you get the idea to wear a billboard?
Mr. Elston: I started learning about what I consider to be the greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history—this business of giving kids puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to modify their body to appear more like the opposite sex in 2019. I came across this term puberty blockers and started reading about it. Of course, these drugs are doing exactly what they say. They are blocking puberty in children.
I’m a dad of two girls. At that time, they were 7 and 9-years-old. Now they are 11 and 14-years-old. I started researching this, and all throughout 2020, I was reading about all of this stuff every night . The more you read, the worse it gets. In July of 2020, a woman in the UK named Posie Parker put up a very controversial sign at the Edinburgh train station that said, “I heart J.K. Rowling.”
I love J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author. J.K. Rowling has spoken out against the assault on women’s rights and this child abuse as well. That sign only lasted a day because some people on Twitter complained that it was hate speech, and the government-run train authority took it down. I’m a dad of girls. I’m not sending them into a crazy world that doesn’t even know what a woman is or that is trying to change the sex of children. I was tired of people not being able to speak about this.
When kids are being harmed, we should be having a lot of conversations. Instead, nobody was talking about it. They were afraid of getting fired from their jobs. My whole objective has been to start conversations. I followed her lead and I put up an actual billboard in Vancouver, Canada, that said, “I love J.K. Rowling.” That lasted only one day as well, because a Vancouver politician said it was hate speech. She pressured the sign company and they took it down. I was prepared for this.
That night, I leveraged all the outrage online into a quick little fundraising campaign. A week later, I had the same billboard up in San Francisco, Portland, LA, all throughout Utah, here in DC all throughout the metro, and in Times Square. That was my September of 2020. But in Canada, where I’m from, no sign companies would work with me. I’m nobody. I’m just a normal dad living out in the suburbs who was living a normal life prior to this. The only thing I could then do was to have some signs made up and go outside.
I wear them just because it’s easier than holding them all day. I know I look ridiculous, but I wear a blazer to try to offset that a little and look more professional. I just have conversations. Because as I said, we have to talk about this. I knew that if I kept going and took all the abuse and the assaults and all that stuff that happens, that this would grow into something.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying you’re this mild-mannered, unassuming, suburbanite dad. But suddenly you’re doing this thing. It was a big shift, correct?
Mr. Elston: Yes. I had never been to a protest in my life before this, so I’m not some activist guy. But like all parents, the most important thing in my life is my kids, and all these children are coming to harm. There’s a funny thing about this. The parents of these kids cannot speak up because they’re going to alienate their own child if they do, and they’re also at risk from the authorities in many jurisdictions, depending where you live.
But in Canada now, all the MPs voted unanimously to call it conversion therapy to help your child feel comfortable with their sex. It’s okay to convince your little girl she’s a boy and that she needs to become a sterilized, anorgasmic, lifelong pharmaceutical patient. But it’s not okay to object to that and help her feel comfortable as a girl. This is now considered conversion therapy and you can go to jail for five years for opposing it.
Mr. Jekielek: Let me get this straight. All federal MPs in Canada voted unanimously on this?
Mr. Elston: That’s right.
Mr. Jekielek: Has anyone shifted their position since then?
Mr. Elston: Sorry, no.
Mr. Jekielek: Your work and many other people’s work has actually shifted the conversation somewhat since that time. A lot of this stuff works through obfuscation and through changing language. You think that you’re supporting something, but you don’t realize what you’re supporting in many cases, correct?
Mr. Elston: Right. If we were to give these members of parliament the benefit of the doubt, we could say they didn’t realize what they were supporting. But I know that they did, because in the history of Canadian politics, this bill received more briefs than any other bill. There was a ton of debate. There were hearings held for the first bill. In 2021, there was a bill called Bill C-6, and this was the same bill that ended up passing.
But this bill at the time did not pass unanimously through the House. 62 conservatives voted against it, and about 50 voted for it, including the current leader, Pierre Poilievre. This bill also didn’t pass the Senate before the election was called. When an election is called, all bills die. Trudeau won again, and this bill came back. This time, they just pushed the same bill through unanimously.
Mr. Jekielek: What is the substance of it?
Mr. Elston: It is called conversion therapy to help your so-called transgender child become cisgender. Now, these are made up terms, as far as I’m concerned. There’s no such thing as a transgender child. They’re called girls and boys. If a girl is a tomboy or if a boy is more effeminate, that’s okay. That’s the positive message we should be sending, that they’re beautiful just as they are. No drugs or scalpels are needed. But in this society, if a girl now says she’s a boy, we are just supposed to take this 12-year-old child at her word.
The trend is to have no therapy and no counseling, because to even suggest counseling would be to invalidate the child’s gender identity. It would suggest there’s something wrong with a girl saying she’s a boy. Why would they need counseling for that? This is the theory of the radical Left. It’s a one-way street. It’s okay to say you’re trans. But it’s not okay to object to harming your child with these experimental drugs and surgeries. It’s not okay to help them feel comfortable with their sex. Yes, this is now a criminal offense.
Good luck prosecuting it. They haven’t prosecuted anybody, and I don’t anticipate them trying that anytime soon.The real purpose of this bill is just to scare people. It is to silence people, and it works. It has silenced the whole therapeutic profession. Most counselors won’t even talk to these kids anymore. I get parents contacting me saying, “Chris, I can’t find a counselor in British Columbia or even from the United States.”
I received an email from a mom recently. In the entire state of Washington, she couldn’t find a counselor, so she came to me looking for help. I know about three people across Canada who will talk to these kids, and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of kids in North America who have now been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s one thing to have a strong idea, but it’s another thing to back it with money, which clearly you did. You’re putting up big billboards and that doesn’t come cheaply. People might think there’s some kind of dark money funding this. How does this work?
Mr. Elston: I’m getting by these days. People donate through my website, 30 bucks or 50 bucks at a time. That’s literally how I’m getting by. I did run up some debt for quite a while. I was running up my credit cards and then working to pay them off.
Mr. Jekielek: Because it was that important to you.
Mr. Elston: Yes, I don’t care about money. Obviously, we have to take care of ourselves and I need to take care of my kids, but money has never been the driver. There’s always been this deeper part of me that is concerned about the world we live in, so that still remains. I’ve had some unique experiences in my life. I’ve had some bad luck and I’ve had a lot of suffering, so that gives me a different perspective on life.
I didn’t care about all the abuse that I knew was going to come my way because I know who I am. My wife and kids know who I am, and that’s all that matters, honestly. Anyone else can say whatever they want. These hit pieces that get written about me, sometimes I retweet them myself. I don’t care. It’s just for fun and to show them that it doesn’t bother me, because that’s what they’re trying to do.
Mr. Jekielek: What about your daughters and your wife? How are they? I am trying to imagine what that looks like.
Mr. Elston: Throughout 2020, before I took this leap, every night I would be reading about this. My wife would be marking homework or her kids’ tests because she’s a teacher. She knew I was passionate about this. I don’t think anyone understood how far I was willing to go to put a stop to this. I had a vision for how to do this, and it’s not complicated. We just need to talk about it, because we have the truth on our side. This is so crazy and can’t possibly last in any society.
Because when you come between parents and their children, and when you teach kids that they’re born wrong and they need to be something they are not, that is not sustainable. It’s always simply been a matter of how long it takes to put a stop to this child abuse. It’s just a question of how many kids are harmed before we stop this. I’ve been more optimistic than pretty much everyone I’ve met, because I also have the advantage of talking to tens of thousands of people on the street.
I’ve known from day one that there is overwhelming support for this message from all of us that are on the side of common sense and know that children are never born in the wrong body, that they are beautiful just as they are, and that we shouldn’t be keeping secrets from parents when a kid at school adopts a transgender identity. Because that is the policy across pretty much every school board in Canada and many states in the U.S. as well—to hide from parents that their own child has a new name and pronouns.
These are psychological interventions that unqualified 22-year-old teachers are subjecting children to. The NHS [National Health Service] in the UK conducted a systematic review of all of the evidence for this. Part of what they said was, “Pronouns are not a benign intervention.”
This is harmful. This is psychologically abusive. You’ve got a struggling child, but universally, that child has something else going on. There is autism. At Tavistock, the biggest gender clinic in the world in the UK, from their own statistics from 1,038 children, 35 percent had moderate to severe autism.
These are the milder cases. There are kids who’ve been sexually abused, probably in more than half the cases. I was speaking with Dr. Quentin Van Meter yesterday. He’s a pediatrician and he deals with these kids. He told me it’s probably about 60 percent. There’s trauma, there’s abuse, there’s eating disorders, and there’s borderline personality disorder. The kids in state care are way overrepresented.
In British Columbia, there’s a psychologist who works for the Ministry of Children and Family Development named Wallace Wong. He gave a talk at the Vancouver Library a few years ago where he said he is transitioning more than 1,000 kids, including more than 500 in the foster system. That is 8 percent of all children in state care who are now being socially or psychologically transitioned by this one doctor. He then sends them to the BC Children’s Hospital, who will give them puberty blockers.
Mr. Jekielek: These are kids that need help and are crying out for help. It took me a while to grasp the magnitude of the harm. The way this “gender-affirming care model” works is that you push aside other issues and you just affirm, affirm, affirm. In other words, you don’t help them with what they really need. It’s difficult for people to fathom that this could be real, and that thousands of kids and young adults have been put through this process.
Mr. Elston: It is difficult to fathom. That’s one of the reasons it grew so fast, because people don’t believe it when they first hear it. Without evidence, who’s going to believe that doctors are cutting off the breasts of 12-year-old girls, because these girls want to be boys? This is happening in the greatest nation on earth that’s ever existed. Their own statistics show this. There’s a young girl named Layla Jane who is suing right now. She was 13-years-old and in the eighth grade when they cut off her breasts. She’s got autism. She had trauma. She’s just a young kid.
Mr. Jekielek: This reminds me of your sign, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.”
Mr. Elston: That’s right. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] writes what are called the standards of care that these gender clinics can follow. They are just guidelines.
Marci Bowers, the former interim president of WPATH, this man who says he’s a woman, admitted on a Zoom call that none of the boys who started on puberty blockers at Tanner Stage 2, the beginning of puberty at 10, 11 12-years-old, none of these boys that are now adults have been able to have an orgasm.
Marci Bowers: Every single child or adolescent who was truly blocked at Tanner Stage 2 has never experienced orgasm. It’s really about zero.
Mr. Elston: Please tell me, what 10 or 11-year-old boy who can’t even conceive of the concept can possibly consent to throwing away their adult sexual function? Of course, they can’t. What child struggling with mental health comorbidities and an abusive home life can consent to sterilizing themselves? These puberty blockers, combined with the cross-sex hormones, are sterilizing children. They are sterilizing thousands of autistic kids, and we’re supposed to be the bigots who are speaking out against this?
It’s total madness. We just have to stop caring what unintelligent, ill-informed people say about us. Do you want to look back at your life in 40 years and say, “I knew about all this child abuse and did nothing”? I don’t, and that’s how I viewed this. I wasn’t going to look back at my life and say, “I did nothing”, because I know that I can do something.
I know that I can do something, so I talk to parents. I could be sitting across the table at Tim Horton’s from some big brawny dad and he’s bawling his eyes out, because he’s losing his girl to this madness. He can’t speak up and the authorities are against him, so someone has to represent him. A lot of the doctors won’t speak up either because they’re worried about losing their license.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about street conversations. Have you counted how many interactions you’ve had on the street? It’s hundreds for sure, and probably thousands.
Mr. Elston: Tens of thousands.
Mr. Jekielek: What’s it like out there on the streets with your sign?
Mr. Elston: It depends where I go, but it’s overwhelmingly supportive. Some people don’t know about this at all, so they'll come up and say, “What are puberty blockers?” I might have a 30-second conversation because it doesn’t take long to explain it. I say, “Kids who think they’re trans are being given a drug that stops their bodies from going into puberty.” The common reaction right away is, “What?”
They don’t believe it. Today though, because there has been so much work on awareness, most people have heard about this now. In the beginning, it was almost nobody. Now I get support nonstop. People give me high-fives, fist bumps, honk their horns, and just come up to thank me because they’ve seen me in a video. The far-Left that is pushing this is losing.
They’ve got a lot of money on their side and a lot of organizations pushing this; governments, the UN, and the WHO. But we’ve got truth on our side and the truth spreads for free. It’s unstoppable. Once people learn this truth, they never forget it, because they’re doing this to kids and their own kids are in danger.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ve seen some of the videos and not everybody is fist bumping with you.
Mr. Elston: That’s right. It depends where I go. At universities, of course, there are going to be more indoctrinated young people. When you’re in a city, there’s hundreds of thousands of people. You’re going to run into some angry, violent people, and that happens from time to time too. I’ve got strategies for dealing with the people who are immediately angry.
I have been assaulted close to 40 times by violent people and I just take it, because that’s far more powerful than reacting with anger. When you can just be peaceful and calm in the face of violence, that’s an extraordinarily powerful visual. I don’t want to be fighting in the street. That’s a terrible look, so I just take the abuse. The people who would come at me that way have learned that it doesn’t work with me, so they have stopped trying.
Mr. Jekielek: But there’s a third category, and you’ve documented this quite well. It is people who start out quite belligerent, but end up being friendly.
Mr. Elston: Yes, that has happened a lot, probably a few hundred times. There was a black gay man at the University of Pennsylvania who rode by on his bike swearing at me. Sometimes with the men, I'll challenge them a little to come back. To this man’s credit, he did come back. I said, “Come have a conversation. Why are you yelling?” He came back, and we talked for 80 minutes outside the university. At first, he was extremely agitated and his face was twitching. Sometimes people are shaking because they get an adrenaline rush.
With people who disagree with me or think they disagree with me, I will say things that I know they cannot possibly disagree with. For example, I will say, “There’s no right way to be a girl or a boy. Our kids are beautiful just as they are. If a girl is a tomboy, if a boy is more effeminate, fine. We shouldn’t put kids in stereotypical boxes.” No one can object to that. The Left thinks they don’t like stereotypes. They will all agree with that message.
But they have this blind spot. They don’t see they are pushing stereotypes to such a degree that if a girl is more masculine they must be trans. I give speeches where I ask the women in the audience, “Who here was a tomboy growing up?” It’s always more than half of the audience. I will ask them, “Who among the women here enjoyed going through puberty?” Not one arm has gone up in the air yet, because it’s a tough time in life and they just have to get through it.
Their bodies are changing. They’re getting sexualized by men and all this other stuff, but we just have to let them grow up. This is the first time in history we have ever dealt with a movement like this. We’ve been around on this planet for maybe 200,000 years as a species. Kids weren’t killing themselves because they were going through puberty. The only thing that the Left ever says is that kids will commit suicide if we don’t transition them. That is their only argument.
Mr. Jekielek: Traditionally, puberty has been an important part of the development process. In fact, it was something that was enshrined and something to be proud of as you transitioned from child to adult. This gender ideology is the opposite of that when they say that puberty should not happen.
Mr. Elston: Right. The theory among these ideologues is that it would be too traumatic for a girl to start looking like a woman or for a boy to look like a man, because that can’t be undone. The theory is to block puberty to keep them looking neutral, then give them the opposite sex hormones. The sales pitch is, “Puberty blockers just buy them time to explore their gender identity. That is nonsense. In 98 percent of the cases, when kids go on puberty blockers, they then progress to the cross-sex hormones.
Because they’re not just signing up for puberty blockers. They’re signing up for the whole thing; the blockers, the cross-sex hormones, and the surgeries. They bought into this idea that they were born wrong and they need to look like the opposite sex to find true happiness. Right now they’re depressed and miserable because of whatever is going on in their life. They’re being sold this lie that it’s because they’re born wrong. Historically, the actual cure for gender dysphoria is puberty itself.
Let’s look back before they ever gave kids puberty blockers. You can look at all the academic studies going back decades. The most recent one followed 139 boys from a very young age into their 20s, and 87 percent of them just grew out of it when they went through puberty, and 63 percent grew up to be gay. Today, these same kids would all get puberty blockers, which would actually block the cure. This is totally insane.
Mr. Jekielek: There is a video of a gay man coming up to you and saying, “I was an effeminate kid. I probably would’ve been transitioned.”
Speaker 1: I’m gay. When I was young, I was a feminine gay kid. If I was a gay feminine kid today, they would have taken my manhood. They would have taken my manhood.
Mr. Elston: These kids who would grow up to be gay today are being taught that just because they’re effeminate little boys, they must be trans.
Speaker 1: This is also about the erasing of gay men and lesbians.
Mr. Elston: Yes, that was in Vancouver. I was actually with a film crew from The Telegraph newspaper in the UK. There were a couple gay men who had walked by who were berating me. Then two other gay men happened to come by and they started arguing with these other gentlemen.
Speaker 2: Okay, I’m gay. I just wanted you to know I’ve known. Once I came out, I realized that I’ve always liked guys.
Speaker 3: He’s not saying there’s anything wrong with you.
Mr. Elston: Okay. Can I have a conversation with you for a sec?
Speaker 3: You have to read the sign. You cannot read it?
Speaker 5: I can’t read it.
Speaker 3: It doesn’t say anything.
Mr. Elston: Okay, let’s just slow down for a minute. Can I have a conversation with you for a sec?
Speaker 2: No, because I have a doctor’s appointment. I have to go.
Mr. Elston: I support the gay community 100 percent.
Speaker 4: No, you don’t. You don’t support them.
Mr. Elston: We shouldn’t be giving...
Speaker 4: I’m gay.
Speaker 5: You don’t support them.
Speaker 3: I’m gay and I support this.
Speaker 5: Okay, you are gay.
Speaker 3: It says gender ideology on the back.
Speaker 4: I don’t support child abuse.
Mr. Elston: That’s a powerful video because it shows that the gay community is not a monolith. They’re just people and people all have different opinions. It’s really powerful because it’s some of these kids that would grow up to be gay who are being harmed. What is the deal here? Is this kid gay or are they trans? I actually never attach sexuality to children at all. We shouldn’t do that.
It’s creepy. They’re not gay. They’re not straight. They are just kids. But historically, a lot of them do grow up to be gay. What the Left has been successful in doing is conflating gay rights with trans rights, and they’ve made this into a civil rights movement. Around 2010, all these organizations won the gay rights that they had been campaigning for.
These TQ organizations, and I don’t call them LGBTQ, they’re just TQ organizations now, they don’t just shut the doors and say, “We achieved our objectives.” They have to keep donations flowing. They have to keep the doors open and everyone employed, so they changed their objectives to trans rights. These five letters combined, LGBTQ, strike fear in the hearts of men. It stops people from talking.
Mr. Jekielek: The Human Rights Campaign has an entire rating system, where if you get rated low on the scale, there can be negative consequences. Some organizations say, “We stand for all LGBTQ.” They say that their organization actually represents this entire, incredibly diverse group.
Mr. Elston: Yes, it makes no sense. It’s actually not even a group. It’s honestly just a tactic to silence people. The 2S in Canada, they always go 2S first, meaning two-spirit, apparently it’s a term for trans indigenous people. But this was made up in the 1990s by white people in academia, to be honest with you. But now it’s 2S LGBTQIA+, so they’re lumping asexual people in. They’re lumping people with disorders in their sexual development and medical conditions into this.
It’s just this huge identity group. We need to get away from all this identitarianism and just get back to our individual identities as human beings, because we’re all different. This is just a means of causing division in society and silencing people. We have to get back to our roots.
Mr. Jekielek: Another clip that you filmed involved an Antifa guy being surprised that not everyone was on his side. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Mr. Elston: Yes. I was in London recently for a conference. This large pro-Palestine rally was going on, so I just went out on the streets of London with my signs on. I ran into a couple people I knew. This Antifa guy from America or Canada swore at me and yelled at me. For me, that’s an invitation for a conversation. I struck up a conversation and did my usual thing.
I started asking him some questions. The other thing you need to do with these aggressive people is to ask them to define what they believe in, “What does it mean for a girl to be a boy?” Then just take a pause. This man was getting flustered. Three Muslim girls came along, probably 17 to 18-years-old, to see what the hullabaloo was all about.
He turned to them for support and said, “This guy thinks kids can’t be trans.” Instantly they said, “They can’t.” They started berating him for about a minute and then he ran off. This was a beautiful moment of intersectionality where he’s there and all these far-Left people are supporting these protests. He automatically thinks that they’re going to support him, but nothing could be further from the truth.
That is where these worlds collide. You have these people out there with their signs, “Queers for Palestine.” Go to Palestine and see what happens. You’re going to be literally thrown off a roof because it’s illegal to be gay in these countries. They’re not progressive at all. But these so-called progressives in the West are trying to lump themselves into these causes.
They’re stuck in this mindset that they are oppressed and that there are oppressors out there. These cis, heteronormative white guys like me are at the top of the oppression pyramid, and everyone else is terribly oppressed. It’s neo-Marxism. Communism has been rebranded these days as equity, which means equality of outcome. That is not what we’re about in the West.
We’re about equality of opportunity where anyone who works hard and works smart can achieve something for themselves. Communism went all throughout the East and South America and Asia, but it never really grabbed hold in the West. It has now been rebranded. The same people who argue with me on the streets about gender ideology are the same people pushing all these other causes as well, and they just see me as an oppressor.
Mr. Jekielek: But you don’t think of yourself that way.
Mr. Elston: No. Advocating for the long-term health of children and letting them grow up and telling them that they’re great just as they are, I don’t believe that to be oppressive.
Mr. Jekielek: In this gender ideology everything is completely turned on its head. That is so obvious, but maybe not as obvious in the other areas you are describing.
Mr. Elston: Even with these conversations, it takes a few minutes just to get to the very basics. To have a thorough conversation about what is happening easily takes an hour. We could talk for hours. Take the sports issue, for example.
You’ve got Lia Thomas literally lapping women in the swimming pool, but when he was in the male division, he was ranked around 500. Everyone sees that and they know instantly that it’s wrong. They get that right away, but even still, people are afraid to speak up. With this conversation about child transition, it takes a bit more time to educate the population.
Over time, when enough people get educated, and it probably only takes 2, 3, 4% of the population to get up to speed on this, we become an unstoppable force. I think we’re already at that point. I have a financial background and I used to be an investment advisor. Even before I started, I viewed this as compounding interest. You start with a dollar and then you double it to $2, then $4, and then $8. Pretty soon you’re at $1 million. It’s the same with this. It’s like a snowball rolling downhill.
When I started, there were probably five people on Twitter talking about this who reached any significant number of people. There was almost no one. Now, this is the number one cultural issue of the day on conservative media and podcasts all day long. Even the Leftist publications are starting to tell the truth. The New York Times has and Reuters has. Even the Washington Post has covered some stories of detransitioners. My focus from day one has been to tell the stories of these detransitioners.
They are the ones who need to be heard and they cannot be denied. They were the 13-years-olds that were harmed for life. They can’t ever have kids. What is the Left going to do to deny their lived experience? They can’t do it, so these stories need to be told.
We are winning spectacularly. Not even two years ago, I was at The Heritage Foundation for a conference with about 35 people from across the country who were fighting this. I was the most optimistic person there because I have a unique experience out on the streets. I knew this wasn’t going to take 10 years. Just a year-and-a-half later, we’ve got 22 states who have passed legislation to stop this.
There were two main things that happened in 2022. A lot of people woke up after seeing Matt Walsh’s film, “What Is a Woman? He doesn’t even offer an opinion during the entire movie. He simply asks that question of the so-called experts at universities and they can’t answer it. A lot of people finally understood there is absolutely no foundation to this ideology.
There is no truth underpinning it. Then these Boston Children’s Hospital videos that I tweeted out later in 2022 went viral. The first one was about how they performed gender-affirming hysterectomies at the children’s hospital where they will cut out the uterus. Sometimes they will cut out the ovaries as well. Now, these girls can never produce estrogen for the rest of their lives. They are now a lifetime pharmaceutical patient no matter what.
Mr. Jekielek: No one could believe this was real. But also people would testify and perjure themselves by saying, “These things don’t happen.”
Mr. Elston: Yes. That video took off and I thought I had better record it because it came from their own YouTube channel. I recorded it and that same night they deleted it, so I tweeted it out again. I recorded 40 more videos. Then they deleted all of them from their website.
But that woke up a lot of people, and it started a cascading effect of conservatives looking into other gender clinics. It has completely changed the conversation. These legislators down the street here at the U.S. Capitol didn’t want to touch this.
I was meeting with some of them, with people from The Heritage Foundation, and with a couple of other people. They were comfortable with the sports issue, but not with child transition, just because they didn’t understand it. It has been a process of education.
When people get educated on this, it lights a fire inside of them, and you can’t put out that fire. They’re just going to learn more, and that fire is going to grow brighter and stronger. As I said, it’s simply a matter of how many children are harmed before we can put a stop to this.
Mr. Jekielek: You have obviously attracted a lot of attention in the process, which is indeed part of your plan. But what about your family? Has anyone tried to interfere with your family?
Mr. Elston: Yes. Right away people doxxed my wife at her workplace. She’s a teacher for grades four or five. Some trans activists, some men identifying as women to be exact, posted online what school she taught at, what class she taught at, and the phone number to call the principal. There’s also a parent at that school that tried to get my wife fired just because of what I say.
But I’m an autonomous individual. I’m allowed to have a separate opinion from my wife. She doesn’t talk in public about this, so there’s nothing they can do. They could try, and I would be happy to sue anyone who does try. When people bully you or bully your wife, how do you deal with bullies? You push back. I personally am just not going to take it. If you come after my wife, that’s a completely different deal than coming after me.
With this one man who tried to get her fired, I did what men should do. We’re going to have a conversation about it. I found out where he worked, and I drove to his place of employment, which turned out to be his apartment building.
Now, I know the line that I shouldn’t cross. I’m not going to bother someone at home, so I didn’t do that. However, I did write that I had gone to visit this person, and unfortunately, it was their home. I wrote that publicly. His name is Nicholas Burling. He then contacted the police, who then contacted me. Right away, this police officer was very aggressive with me as though I had done something wrong, because he had only heard that guy’s side of the story.
After having a 45 minute conversation, the police officer said to me, “Chris, I would have done the exact same thing that you did,” so he put a stop to that guy. He ended up making a bunch of TikTok videos. I received death threats for a couple of weeks from all sorts of people. But then he just stopped.
Another man tried to get my wife in trouble, and I went and had conversations on a street in his community where for three days he stalked me from afar. Then one day he drove by and he stopped and he threatened to kill me. He threatened to shoot me, and I got that on video. He got arrested, and I finally got that guy a criminal record. He’s not even allowed to talk about me on social media anymore.
I did everything peacefully. I didn’t even say a word to him, and he got himself a criminal record. They have learned not to mess with my family because I’m going to push back. However, I’m going to do it the smart way. In the very beginning, I wasn’t recording conversations or anything. I was just out there.
Maybe I would take a photo, but I was just talking to people. I was happy because I was reaching some parents and I knew that they were going to be able to protect their own kids now, because nobody knew what was going on. They didn’t know what was in the schools.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the role of schools in all this.
Mr. Elston: It depends on the teacher you get. It depends on the administrator as well, and what they’re pushing. I never say there’s one solution for all of this. You shouldn’t automatically take your kids out of school. It depends on your kid. But children are being taught that they might have been born in the wrong body. A lot of this is presented, maybe not directly, but it’s part of an anti-bullying program that some kids are trans.
Of course, we want to be inclusive and welcoming and support them. Obviously, we need to love all children no matter what, but this is indoctrination and this is a social contagion. Social media is the prime driver of all of this. It really started taking off around 2015 with Tumblr, TikTok, and Reddit. All these kids are online. But the second-biggest driver for sure is what’s going on in our schools. Because you get these activist teachers who believe in this and they can impact a lot of kids.
These schools also have after-school clubs called Gender and Sexuality Alliances. A lot of the troubled kids end up going to these places. They'll give them free pizza. These are awkward kids who maybe don’t have a lot of friends, and now they’ve found a group that loves them. They take on this special identity of trans, and now they’re treated as special. They’re celebrated.
The whole school is now going along with a lie and using the alternate pronouns for them. I talk about pronouns because people never fully comprehend how damaging it is to use the wrong pronouns for a child. What message are you sending when you call a girl he/him? You are telling that girl that she needs to be something she’s not.
Mr. Jekielek: Also, from a position of authority as a parent.
Mr. Elston: Or from a teacher or the administrator, but she’s getting affirmed with this lie that she was born wrong. Then thousands of times throughout the school year, it’s getting reaffirmed every time those pronouns are used. What chance does this struggling 12-year-old have of backing out of that? None. They would have to admit to the whole school that they were wrong about this.
Mr. Jekielek: Then they have to face the backlash.
Mr. Elston: Face the backlash. Absolutely. This is extraordinarily harmful, and teachers watching this should not go along with these lies. Do not do it. To succeed, evil never presents itself as evil. There is something attractive about all the cults that people get sucked into. There’s some truth at the surface level. There’s the love bombing that goes on. For evil to really prosper, it has to have a nice, pleasant, fluffy surface level.
That’s what this is. Empathy, kindness, understanding, yes, these are all things that everyone agrees with. But what is really going on? Lies, deception, and physical child abuse are the results of all this. Instead of telling our kids that they’re born in the wrong body, let’s just tell them they’re perfect just as they are. If they want to do something as an adult, that’s a totally different conversation.
Even then, 18, 19, and 20-year-olds should be screening for trauma. They should be screening for abuse and other mental health comorbidities. Those should be taught first. But the fact of the matter is, if we just let these kids grow up and we stopped teaching them that they might have been born wrong, this whole thing is going to die. You’re not going to end up with these 20-year-olds who are caught up in this because this is a cult that has spread all throughout society.
It’s a social contagion, and it’s going to take some time to put this thing to bed and kill it completely, but we’re going to do it. It never disappears completely. There will always be true believers, but we will put a stop to this because it’s too crazy to last.
Mr. Jekielek: Chris, a final thought as we finish up?
Mr. Elston: For people watching this at home, they need to find some courage. They need to be positive. Instead of looking for reasons you can’t do something, look for ways that you can, because I guarantee that they’re out there.
Mr. Jekielek: It could be as simple as strapping on a sign and walking outside. It’s unorthodox and appears silly. But as one person, you’ve made a profound difference in a very non-aggressive way.
Mr. Elston: Yes, it’s working. It’s low tech. It’s talking to people. As human beings, we’re supposed to talk to people face to face, so that’s all I’m doing. I have faith in the goodness of humanity. I have faith that other people are going to come along and help out, and that is happening.
So yes, I’ve been a bit of a catalyst. But there are other people like Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich of Moms for Liberty who are doing amazing work. They’re extremely brave and courageous. They take so much hate. I introduced this subject to Tiffany one night in a Twitter space where I bumped into her.
It was the first time I had ever heard of Moms for Liberty, and I told her what I was doing. She believed in me right away. Now there’s 130,000 moms across the country fighting this, and that’s an army of parents. We’re not going to be stopped because our children’s lives matter more than our own.
If you’re watching this, I suggest you get on board, reach out to some other group that’s fighting this, reach out to me, go to a school board meeting, and do whatever you can. But we have to do something. It’s like the law of physics, an object in motion stays in motion.
Mr. Jekielek: Chris Elston, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Elston: Thank you so much, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Chris Elston and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (46 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0127ChrisElston
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