A grieving California mom says her severely depressed teen daughter was encouraged to leave her family, go into foster care, and begin taking cross-sex hormones before she developed unbearable pain and killed herself by laying down across the tracks in front of a train.
Abigail Martinez, 53, alleged school staff at Arcadia High School—without her knowledge or consent—encouraged her daughter, Yaeli, to join an LGBTQ club that met at the school during lunchtime.
She blames a school psychologist and other school staff, the Los Angeles County’s Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), a transgender student and her mother, and the LGBTQ club for “brainwashing” and coaching Yaeli on how to get hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery instead of recommending treatment for her depression.
“They were doing all this secretly,” Martinez said. “I didn’t even realize that my daughter was going to this club because they don’t report to you what they’re doing at school to keep them ‘safe’ from their parents, according to them.”
Martinez is not alone in her allegations. Parents at other school districts in California and other states have made similar accusations, which have led to legal battles over parental rights.
In Spreckels Unified School District in Salinas, California, parent Jessica Konen accused school staff at Buena Vista Middle School of indoctrinating her daughter through an LGBTQ club. The two teachers allegedly involved have been suspended after an audio recording revealed them talking about how they had subverted parents and spied on middle school students to help recruit them into the club.
Depression Deepens
As a child Yaeli was a “girly girl” who liked to wear dresses. As a young teen, she liked boys but by 15, just after she started high school, Yaeli was questioning her sexuality, Martinez said.
Martinez thought it was a normal teenage phase until Yaeli spiraled into a deeper depression and began to question her biological gender. She told her mom she felt like she was trapped in the wrong body.
Yaeli’s grades had plummeted, so Martinez called the school to arrange a meeting with the school psychologist, teachers, and other staff, she said.
The staff were aware Yaeli was attending the LGBTQ club, but none of them informed her, Martinez said.
Eventually, one of Yaeli’s older sisters told Martinez that Yaeli had been going to the LGBTQ club at school, and she discovered an older girl at the school who was transitioning to male had befriended Yaeli and had also helped coax her to join the LGBTQ club. The mom of the trans student had accepted her own daughter’s new male identity and taken Yaeli under her wing, she said.
Yaeli came home from high school one day with a new extensive vocabulary of gender-related terms, and Martinez knew she had been coached.
She found out Yaeli had assumed the name, “Jay,”—she later changed to “Andrew” because it sounded too close to her birth name—and was using male pronouns at school.
The older girl and her mom suggested Martinez call Yaeli “Jay” and use male pronouns, but Martinez told them she wasn’t ready for that, and avoided using any name or pronouns.
But the older trans student and her mother accused Martinez of being unsupportive of Yaeli’s new gender identity.
Yaeli attempted suicide a couple more times while living at home, prompting a former principal at the school to go to the hospital and blame Martinez for not calling Yaeli by her “new name,” Martinez said.
“She was at the hospital, and then he came up to me, like kind of upset like, ‘Oh, is it too hard for you to call your child a new name?’” Martinez said. “He was like, ‘It’s just a new name!’”
“They were pushing me,” she said.
Martinez told the principal that a new name wasn’t going to change anything, and that Yaeli needed to be treated properly for depression, she said.
And when a social worker suggested Martinez hold a funeral for her daughter and adopt her son, Andrew, Martinez was shocked in disbelief.
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about? Did you hear what you just said?’ … and I said, ‘How dare you tell me to bury my daughter!’” Martinez said.
Source: The Epochtimes