On Monday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel discussion titled “How Radical Gender Ideology Is Taking Over Public Schools & Harming Kids.”
One mother who spoke was Abby Martinez from California. She explained how her suicidal teenage daughter, Yaeli, was taken into foster care after Abby expressed skepticism that gender transition would cure her daughter’s severe mental-health problems.
Several years later, at the age of 19, Yaeli killed herself by stepping in front of a freight train in Pomona, Calif.
The response of local LGBTQ+ ideologues — who had already done so much to break up a loving family and alienate a deeply troubled adolescent from those most willing and best positioned to help — was to lament that they didn’t meddle even further.
“Andrew [Yaeli’s trans name] M.’s death must be met with urgency to provide youth, including transition-age youth in foster care, identified as LGBTQ+ with support and resources to live proud, productive, happy lives,” reads a motion proposed by Los Angeles County supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl. Solis and Kuehl pledged to “create and implement prevention and intervention services that minimize family rejection when such services are necessary.”
The implication, which conveniently absolves them of all accountability, is that Yaeli’s family is the reason she killed herself and that, if only her family had been more effectively “re-educated,” this tragic outcome could have been avoided.
How cruel and arrogant can you be?
Of course, Abby Martinez’s version of events tells a very different story. Abby says that it was nothing but her skepticism of the supposedly life-saving benefits of gender transition that led the school psychologist (in partnership with LGBT activists) to tell the Department of Child and Family Services that Yaeli would be better off out of the house.
“They took away my daughter when she was 16 years old,” Abby tearfully told the audience at Heritage. “I tried my best to get her back. Going to court every single month. I never missed a court day because I wanted my daughter back. That’s all I wanted — to see her happy, and back home.”
Now that will never happen.
Watch Abby’s testimony here. Her segment begins around 21:00.
