Detransitioner persuades Texas school board to get rid of ‘gender fluidity material’ by sharing firsthand experience

A school board in Texas passed an amendment to prevent “gender fluidity material from being distributed in schools” after powerful testimony from a detransitioner.

“As a child, I was groomed to be trans,” 25-year-old Emelie Schmidt told the Katy ISD board on Aug. 26. “My school had a huge part in this.”

Allowing these materials in schools teaches children to think “their bodies are wrong” and walk down “a path of suicidal ideation and anxiety,” Schmidt argued. 

“Why do you want to teach children that self-hatred is normal?” she asked the board. “Why do you want to teach children that they have to chop off healthy body parts in order to be happy? And why do people like you tell me that I needed to self-harm in order to be happy?” 

She sat down to cheers and applause from the audience. But as her own story demonstrates, the battle for the hearts and souls of schoolchildren continues across America – often couched in the language of happiness, gender pronouns and mental health. 

Online predators, school policies undermining parental guidance 

The television show I Am Jazz began Schmidt’s exploration into transgenderism when she was 14 years old. 

“For the teen going through puberty, deeply self-conscious, and looking for an alternative to what appeared to be an uphill self-image struggle, the show represented a gateway,” wrote journalists Robert Montoya and Daniel Greer for Texas Scorecard. 

The show appealed to her sense of isolation growing up as a tomboy who “didn’t quite fit in with the girls,” Schmidt told the school board. 

“This made me believe that my body was wrong and needed fixing with hormones and surgery,” she explained. “All I ever really needed was for someone to tell me that it’s OK to be a tomboy.” 

However, the 14-year-old Schmidt never received this advice. She visited the show’s Facebook pages and began conversing with adult men who invited her “to private chat rooms to talk about her sexuality,” according to Texas Scorecard. 

Over time, these online predators introduced Schmidt to transgender ideologies. One primary strategy they used involved alienating her from her parents, the journalists noted. 

“They sowed the seeds of distrust and told her that because her parents wouldn’t call her ‘Jacob’ and let her take hormones, they hated her; they wanted her dead.” 

Men sent Schmidt a chest binder as well as advice on making “bathtub hormones,” or makeshift hormone replacement therapy with over-the-counter medications. 

“This type of activity has exploded in the present day,” Montoya and Greer wrote of the grooming Schmidt received as a child. “Now, there’s a whole network of trans adults sending hormones to minors behind their parents’ backs.” 

School became a place for Schmidt to wear the chest binder, then remove it before her parents returned home from work. 

Additionally, the school she attended at the time – Port Neches-Groves ISD in southeast Texas – had gender identity policies requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns, Schmidt said. 

These practices directly contradicted the instructions of Schmidt’s mom. 

“Her mother could not have been clearer with the school district: her daughter should be called by her given name, and she should be treated like all the other girls,” Montoya and Greer wrote. 

“These instructions were ignored, a reality her mother didn’t know until she read her daughter’s name embroidered on a graduation blanket. The blanket didn’t display her daughter’s real name, but the one school staff had used for years, Jacob Sullivan.” 

‘One form of self-harm for another’ 

When Schmidt was 17, she sent her teachers the following email: “I wanted to let you know that I am trans; I would greatly appreciate it if you called me Jacob and he/him pronouns.” 

Two of her teachers sent email responses affirming Schmidt’s requests. The school also called Schmidt’s mother to set up a meeting to argue “the troubled teen was at severe risk if her trans behavior was not embraced and encouraged,” according to Montoya and Greer. 

“According to the school shrink, her mom needed to start calling her ‘Jacob’ at home and use he/him pronouns. If she refused, the teen was going to kill herself.” 

However, these warnings fail to align with available data on children with gender dysphoria. 

“Evidence-based medical research now demonstrates there is little to no benefit from any or all suggested ‘gender affirming’ interventions for adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria,” a group of medical professionals wrote in a recent “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration.” 

“Social ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, masculinizing or feminizing hormones, and surgeries, individually or in combination, do not appear to improve long-term mental health of the adolescents, including suicide risk.” 

Doctors, pediatricians, and nurses who signed the declaration also warned of long-term risks to gender-affirming care, including psychological illness, low bone density, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and sterility. 

The school had treated Schmidt as a special-needs student up to this time, noting in a June 2016 psychological evaluation her “outbursts” and propensity to self-harm by slitting her wrists. 

However, the school’s subsequent gender-affirming policies only increased her mental health problems, according to Schmidt. 

“Teachers were required to call me ‘Jacob’ and use ‘he/him’ pronouns,” she said in a 2023 testimonial before the Texas House Public Health Committee. “I believe that if they would have called me by my real name that I would have came out of my delusions and depressions sooner. I am proof that a child can overcome gender dysphoria by not feeding into their delusions.” 

Meanwhile, wearing the chest binder “caused constant physical pain, a distraction that replaced the wrist slitting she’d previously performed,” according to Texas Scorecard. “Rather than deal with underlying issues, she’d swapped one form of self-harm for another.” 

Schmidt credits her mom with helping her overcome her gender dysphoria. 

During an hour-long trip to the beach during her 2016 winter finals, Schmidt’s mom told her “no matter what, she was still a girl,” Montoya and Greer wrote. 

“While it took her a little more than a year to come to terms with that day’s realization, she eventually did, and she began the detransitioning process.” 

Now she is married and trying to become a mother herself, Schmidt told Texas Scorecard. 

“It makes me want to do more to get involved. It’s just insane how much they’re able to hide from their parents because parents rarely even see their kids. You send them off to school and see [them] for a few hours before bed, and that’s it. These people have complete control over your kid, basically,” she said. 

“When I eventually have kids, I’m going to homeschool them, because I do not trust our school system.”