A mother from California has denounced the state's public school system for influencing students about gender ideology.
Abigail Martinez, a California mother appeared before participants in a recent panel discussion hosted by the Heritage Foundation, in which she shared the tragic story about her 16 year old daughter who struggled with gender identity and eventually took her own life. The California mother spoke out against the state's public school system and accused them of brainwashing students about gender ideology.
CBN News reported that Martinez was overcome with emotion as she described her late daughter as a "girlie girl" during her early childhood who enjoyed dressing up like a princess. However, in seventh and eighth grade, the California mother's young daughter began displaying signs of depression.
Martinez recounted how she reached out to school officials to help her daughter and requested them to "keep an eye on her." She also shared how her daughter was bullied at school, where other students called her ugly. When the daughter got to high school, she decided she wanted to be a boy, Martinez said.
"When she started high school, the doors opened to what she was talking about, like transgender, going to meetings, going to all the support that they think they have for these children...which is not," Martinez argued.
The concerned California mother said that the school counselor, Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), and LGBT was "in there too, trying to 'help'" Martinez's daughter on the "transition of being transgender." Martinez recounted how she met with the school principal and counselor, who she both accused of making things worse. Her daughter had a failed suicide attempt after which she was placed in foster care. Soon after, she started going by the name of Andrew.
"The school psychology and LGBT told DCFS that my daughter would be better off out of the house," a distraught Martinez explained. "They took away my daughter when she was 16-years-old. I tried my best to get her back...going to court every single month."
The California mother lamented that she even asked the judge to let her daughter have a psychiatric evaluation. However, the judge denied her request because her daughter's social worker said that the teenaged girl needed to be acknowledged as a transgender individual. Martinez appealed to the court to focus on her daughter's mental health issues instead of the gender identity issue and to "help her from the inside out."
But Martinez was denied, as she said, "What hurt me the most was that I was told not to talk about God." She alleged that a social worker warned her that talking about God was going to make her daughter "feel uncomfortable because [she's] in danger of committing suicide."
In September 2019, Martinez's daughter took her own life by kneeling in front of an oncoming train. The California mother said she hoped no other parent would have to feel the anguish she had to go through.
"I want everyone to know the truth because it didn't have to happen," Martinez lamented. "I don't want this to happen to any other family or to go through all this pain. There's a lot of pain."
In 2021, Forbes reported that more than half or up to 52% of transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated suicide in 2020. The statistics were the result of The Trevor Project's third annual National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, which was based on a survey on 35,000 LGBTQ youth, ages 13 to 24 in the U.S.
