Four years ago, Erin Lee’s 12-year-old daughter Amy* was sitting on the bleachers alone at her new middle school. Having recently moved and just started puberty, Amy was struggling to make friends and was incredibly vulnerable, Lee said. So when a trusted teacher walked up to Amy that day and invited her to an after-school art club, the lonely tween said yes – changing not only the course of her life, but her family’s life, forever. 

While Amy believed she was walking into an art club, it turned out to be a meeting for the Gender & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club, where children were taught to question their gender identity and keep secrets from their parents, Lee said. 

“She sent us a last-minute text saying, ‘Hey, can I stay late after school today?’” Lee recalled during an interview with IW Features. “She had no idea that [the teacher] was deceiving us.” 

Lee and her husband have since filed a lawsuit against the Colorado school district based on the school’s deception, alleging the district violated their 14th Amendment right to direct the upbringing of their child. 

Even worse, Lee alleged the school’s actions caused their impressionable daughter’s mental health to spiral, the consequences of which they are still battling.

“They told her, ‘If you’re not fully comfortable in your body, that means you’re trans,’” Lee said of the GSA club. “They expressed that being trans makes you more likely to be suicidal, and they even got into ways that kids do it.”

Lee said Amy did not know what suicide was until attending the GSA meeting, planting a dangerous seed in her young daughter’s mind. 

“She was sleeping with stuffed animals, playing with Barbies, coloring – just innocent, and they really went after her because of it,” Lee said. 

According to Lee, the teacher who “recruited” Amy is affiliated with a group called SPLASH Youth, which “serves LGBTQIA+ youth ages 2-24.”

“Girls were continually being groomed and abused in this club,” Lee said. “I learned that the district had been grooming [Amy] pretty systematically for the two years that we were there.” 

Lee revealed to IW Features that one of the GSA guest speakers was a self-described “gender queer shapeshifting blood witch,” who spoke with Amy via the instant messaging platform Discord without Lee’s knowledge or consent. Lee believes she was never supposed to find out that any of this was happening. 

But the truth came out on May 4, 2021, when Amy came home from school with bags of LGBTQ+ paraphernalia. Equipped with flags, stickers, bracelets, and all kinds of LGBTQ+ merchandise, Lee recalled her daughter announcing: “I understand now why I’m so uncomfortable. I’m trans. My name is Toby.”

Lee and her husband, who considered themselves “moderately progressive” before these events took place, said they were shocked by Amy’s declaration and immediately tried to set their daughter back on the right track. 

“We pulled her out of school the next day,” Lee said. “I went and got a night job at the liquor store in town so that we could pay for private Christian school.” 

In addition to switching schools and enrolling Amy in therapy, Lee and her husband restricted their daughter’s internet access by taking away her phone. What they didn’t know, however, was that Amy was still in contact with a classmate from her previous school using a Chromebook she hid under her bed. This classmate reportedly continued to affirm her “trans” identity, and unfortunately, so did the therapists and doctors entrusted with Amy’s mental health. 

“The first therapist was queer and trans – we stopped that quickly,” Lee said. Then, they tried a faith-based counselor, but “they wouldn’t touch the issue,” Lee said. This is because, in 2019, Colorado passed a law banning alleged “conversion therapy,” thereby mandating an affirmation-only approach for gender-confused youth. 

As Amy’s mental health continued to decline, Lee said she and her husband grew desperate – especially after Amy left them a suicide note in December 2021. 

“This all started with the art club … I don’t know how to make sense of my thoughts, and I don’t want to kill myself, but I’m afraid I’m going to do something,” Amy said in the note, according to Lee. 

Since they had received no help from therapists, Lee said they took Amy to their trusted pediatrician, who immediately prescribed Zoloft and told Lee that if she and her husband didn’t affirm Amy’s “trans” identity, their daughter would kill herself. 

“I was a wreck,” Lee said. “I was afraid for her to be alone. I was afraid when I woke up in the morning that she wouldn’t be alive.”

In March 2022, Lee said her husband found the Chromebook that Amy was using to communicate with classmates from her previous school. Scrolling through her Google Chat history, Lee’s husband saw messages reading, “My parents don’t understand me, they don’t love me, they won’t let me be my true self.” 

Lee said her husband sat Amy down at the kitchen table and asked her to read the Google Chat messages out loud.

“She made the most horrific screaming noise I’ve ever heard in my life,” Lee said. “And we looked at her like, ‘Do you really think we don’t love you? You think we’re not here for you no matter what?’”

That moment of reckoning, Lee said, was the “off-ramp” that Amy had been waiting for. While she and her husband had been tiptoeing around the issue for a year, what Amy needed was for her parents to help her stop living a lie. 

 “She said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m ready to be done,” Lee recalled. 

Four years later, Lee said, Amy is a thriving teen who looks back on that time as “just another chapter in my book.” Amy is also fully supportive of her parents’ legal action against the school district, Lee said, and has told them, “I don’t want this to happen to other kids.” 

The prominence of the family’s lawsuit, along with Lee’s parental rights advocacy, quickly attracted attention in their liberal Colorado hometown. Unfortunately, Lee said, certain friends and family members have ended their relationship with them because of it. 

Despite the judgment they’ve faced, however, she said they’ll stay and fight for the parents who have been deceived and the children who have lost their innocence due to radical gender ideology.

“We’re doing the right thing, so it doesn’t matter what people say about us,” Lee said. “This is a righteous effort to educate people and protect kids – it shouldn’t matter what side of the aisle we’re on.”